[1] The phenomenon of change deafness is thought to be related to the interactions between high and low level processes that produce conscious experiences of auditory soundscapes.
[1] Evidence that attention influences change deafness has been observed across a variety of auditory paradigms, including those consisting of semantic language and natural sounds.
In both cases the critical words of the continuation were de-accented, in order to minimize prosodic differences across both versions of the story.
The differential event-related potential shows that the participants processed the change, but it took significantly longer to detect than expected.
It is important to note the ambiguity concerning the mechanism that produces the effect of attention on change-deafness, and this study suggests two possibilities.
Functional MRI results revealed that physical change in stimulus was correlated with increased BOLD responses in the right auditory cortex, near the lateral portion of Heschl's gyrus, the first cortical structure to process incoming auditory information, but not in hierarchically higher brain regions.
[5] Conscious change detection was correlated with increased coupled responses in the ACC and the right insula, consistent with additional evidence that the anterior insula functions to mediate dynamic interactions between other brain networks involved in attention to external stimuli, forming a salience network with the ACC that identifies salient stimulus events and initiates additional processing.