Carryl L.

Most of the study of how people acquire and process information has focused on vision, says Baldwin (auditory research, George Mason U.), and when hearing has been considered at all, it usually involves lower-level processes such as loudness and pitch perception. She points out that adults as well as children must expend effort to comprehend auditory information in daily life, and such auditory processing relies on mechanisms of the brain as well as the ear. She describes these interacting sensory and cognitive mechanisms. Her topics include the auditory world, the role of attention and cognition in auditory processing, theories and techniques of assessing mental workload, mental workload and speech processing, cross-modal influences in sound and speech, and auditory processing in the older adult. Annotation �穢2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)