I've Heard That Before: Habituation of the Orienting Response Follows Repeated Presentation of Auditory Structural Features in Radio

Abstract

Research has used the cardiac orienting response (OR) to show that structural changes in the auditory environment cause people to briefly but automatically pay attention to messages such as radio broadcasts, podcasts, and web streaming. The voice change—an example of an auditory structural feature—elicits orienting across multiple repetitions. This article reports two experiments designed to investigate whether automatic attention allocation to repeated instances of other auditory structural features—namely production effects, jingles, and silence—is a robust phenomenon or if repetition leads to habituation. In Study 1 we show that listeners of a simulated radio broadcast exhibit ORs following the onset of auditory structural features that differ in semantic content. The prediction that listeners would not habituate to feature repetition was not supported. Instead, both jingles and synthesized production effects result in more iconic ORs to the second repetition compared with the first. However, orienting significantly diminished following the third repetition of both. Study 2 replicates this result using multiple repetitions of structural features containing identical semantic content.

Keywords:

• Attention
• Orienting Response
• Habituation
• Audio
• Radio
• Psychophysiology

Notes

[1] Data collection took place over several months due to researcher and laboratory availability. There was a concern that participants participating later in the experiment would be tired of and negatively respond to the songs chosen early in the experiment. Therefore, we replaced the stimulus songs once during the course of the experiment. Analyses show no significant differences in physiological responses across these two phases of the study and the results presented here are data collapsed across these two stimuli sets.

[2] The research laboratory where these studies were conducted often combines research protocols to maximize data collected from volunteer subjects during a single visit to the facility. The personality questionnaires and media-use survey were dependent variables associated with other studies and are not discussed further in this manuscript.