Change Deafness

Change deafness is a perceptual phenomenon in which, under certain circumstances, a physical change in an auditory stimulus goes unnoticed by the listener. Researchers remain uncertain about the exact mechanisms by which such changes go undetected, and have studied the levels of auditory processing at which the undetected change is nonetheless encoded. The phenomenon is thought to arise from interactions between higher and lower level auditory processes that together produce a listener's conscious experience of a soundscape, and understanding it more fully could clarify the limits of the auditory perceptual system and its relationship to memory.