# Auditory attention **Opening (not a real abstract):** One of the most fundamental questions in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience concerns how it is that human beings can selectively attend to certain aspects of their environment, while at the same time ignoring, or inhibiting, the processing of other, currently less-relevant, stimuli (Kauramäki et al., 2007). Researchers first started to investigate the topic of auditory selective attention after the Second World War, in an attempt to try to understand why it was that fighter pilots sometimes failed to perceive perfectly audible messages presented to them over headphones. Cognitive psychologists such as Donald Broadbent, based at the Applied of selective attention that operate unimodally within the visual modality, there has been a resurgence of interest in the mechanisms of auditory attention over the last decade or so. What is more, **Authors:** [[Charles Spence and Valerio Santangelo]]