Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to extract relevant information. Until now, it is unknown to what extent children have developed the cognitive processes of intentional attention control in spatial situations and how they differ from adults. This work provides a paradigm to examine children's intentional switching of auditory selective attention that also allows to examine effects due to noisy and spatial sound environments presented virtually via headphones. A listening experiment was conducted in Germany with 24 children (6-10 years, 50% female) and 24 young adults (18-26 years, 50% female). First, results revealed higher error rates and lower reaction times in conditions with noise (relative to conditions without noise) for children, but not for adults. This assumes that children are more sensitive to noise and conclude faster with noise trials, taking errors into account. Second, although auditory attention flexibility reflected in attention switch and relevant information selection was comparable between children and adults, it was found that adults benefited from spatial cues when selecting the relevant information. This was not observed to the same extent in children. These results suggest that children's cognitive processes are affected at significantly lower noise levels than adults and that noise effect assessment methods should consider spatial aspects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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与成人相比，儿童在空间和嘈杂的声学环境中有意切换听觉选择性注意力。

儿童的发展和教育发生在具有高度复杂声学场景的教育建筑中，包括空间分布的目标扬声器、许多周围分散注意力的声音和一般背景噪音。因此，听觉选择性注意是定位自己、专注于特定声源和提取相关信息的宝贵工具。到目前为止，尚不清楚儿童在多大程度上发展了空间情境中的有意注意力控制的认知过程，以及它们与成人有何不同。这项工作提供了一个范式来检查儿童的听觉选择性注意力的有意切换，这也允许检查由于通过耳机虚拟呈现的嘈杂和空间声音环境造成的影响。在德国进行了一项听力实验，有 24 名儿童（6-10 岁，50% 女性）和 24 名年轻人（18-26 岁，50% 女性）。首先，结果显示，在有噪音的条件下（相对于没有噪音的条件），儿童的错误率更高，反应时间更短，但对于成人则不然。这假设儿童对噪音更敏感，并通过噪音试验更快地得出结论，同时考虑到错误。其次，尽管在注意力转换和相关信息选择中反映的听觉注意力灵活性在儿童和成人之间具有可比性，但发现成人在选择相关信息时受益于空间线索。在儿童中未观察到相同程度的情况。这些结果表明，儿童 s 认知过程受到的噪音水平明显低于成人，噪音影响评估方法应考虑空间方面。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2022 APA，保留所有权利）。