Experience-Driven Auditory Attention.

In addition to conscious goals and stimulus salience, an observer's prior experience also influences selective attention. Early studies demonstrated experience-driven effects on attention mainly in the visual modality, but increasing evidence shows that experience drives auditory selection as well. We review evidence for a multiple-levels framework of auditory attention, in which experience-driven attention relies on mechanisms that acquire control settings and mechanisms that guide attention towards selected stimuli. Mechanisms of acquisition include cue–target associative learning, reward learning, and sensitivity to prior selection history. Once acquired, implementation of these biases can occur either consciously or unconsciously. Future research should more fully characterize the sources of experience-driven auditory attention and investigate the neural mechanisms used to acquire and implement experience-driven auditory attention. In addition to conscious goals and physical salience, experience also influences auditory attention. Experience-driven attention operates at multiple levels, including an acquisition level involving the sources of attentional control and an implementation level involving attentional guidance. There are many forms of experience-driven attention, including cue–target associative learning, reward learning, and selection history. These categories represent dissociable effects that rely on a complex of different learning mechanisms. Experience can both consciously and unconsciously influence attentional guidance. In some cases, observers guide attention consciously based on explicit recognition of their experiences. Conscious recognition is not necessary for experience to affect auditory attention, however, as many forms of experience implicitly affect attentional guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]