The successful navigation of complex everyday environments with multiple sensory inputs—such as restaurants, busy streets, and other social settings—relies on the brain’s ability to organize the barrage of information into discrete perceptual objects on which cognitive processes, such as selective attention, can act.
Sharp Attention Explains Why the Early Bird Gets the Worm
Auditory attention is the ability to focus on specific sounds. Attention capture is the involuntary response to sound targets in the environment. For humans, auditory attention can mean having a conversation in a noisy room, but still recognizing and responding (attention capture) to hearing a name being called from a distance.