Auditory attention — focusing the searchlight on sound
Section snippets
Introduction and overview
Auditory attention allows us to rapidly and precisely direct our acoustic searchlight toward sounds of interest in our acoustic environment. Attention can be top-down (voluntary or task-dependent) or bottom-up (sound-based salience). At the interface of perception and action, top-down attention leads to enhanced information processing, behavioral sensitivity, and shortened response latencies. Top-down attention is a selection process that focuses cortical processing resources on the most
Relationship between pre-attentive and attentive processes in auditory scene analysis
In order to focus auditory attention on specific acoustic objects of interest in the real world, we typically make use of a combination of auditory spatial cues and auditory feature cues to solve the pattern recognition problem of foreground–background decomposition (FBD). This is illustrated by one of the best known examples of auditory attention, the ‘cocktail party effect’, in which we can attend and selectively eavesdrop on different speakers in a crowded room brimming with multiple
Auditory spatial attention
Depending upon whether an auditory task requires attending to a spatial location, or to an auditory feature or object, there may be differential activation of the auditory ‘what’ and ‘where’ pathways [73, 74, 75]. Attentional mechanisms can modulate neural activity encoding the spatial location and/or the acoustic attributes of the selected targets and the early sensory representation of attended stimuli [2•]. For simplicity, we shall distinguish between auditory spatial and non-spatial
Auditory feature and object attention — extracting signals from background
A variety of complex, shifting acoustic soundscapes present enormous challenges for acoustic scene analysis and for attentional focus on auditory features or objects such as environmental soundscapes (such as a morning chorus of birds), polyphonic music and speech. Top-down attention can selectively focus on a limited range of an acoustic feature dimensions [7], or can even focus on the expected (or recalled) features of an auditory target [15]. Although bottom-up salience certainly plays a
Auditory attention in time
Precisely focused temporal expectancies, such as musical expectancies, are likely to be very important in auditory processing since many auditory patterns unfold in time. A recent ERP study has shown that auditory attention can be temporally directed to focus on events that are projected to occur at a particular future point in time [106]. In another study, subjects engaged in an auditory task could avoid involuntary attentional capture by distracting acoustic stimuli, by foreknowledge of when
Attentive imagery in silence and hallucinations
In auditory induction (such as the familiar psychoacoustic phenomena of FM completion or phonemic restoration) the auditory system fills in occluded information, as when missing foreground sound segments are perceptually restored in the presence of background sound [23, 117, 118]. Although it might seem at first glance like a reasonable candidate for top-down effects, there is considerable evidence for pre-attentive mechanisms in auditory induction [118], though this may be influenced by
Effects of auditory attention on receptive-field plasticity
The adaptive functions of the cerebral cortex rely upon flexibility and plasticity of information processing networks. Since the topic of plasticity of auditory cortical processing has been recently reviewed [135], we will focus in this section on the evidence that attention may play a decisive role in triggering auditory plasticity, particularly in the adult brain [12, 136]. Parallel studies have shown that attention can initiate plasticity in other sensory cortices, as well as in motor cortex
Intermodal and crossmodal interactions between auditory and visual attention
There are many similarities between attention in the auditory and visual modalities, where a two-component framework for attentional selection (top-down and bottom-up) has also emerged from psychophysical, behavioral, and neurobiological studies. Two sets of mechanisms are thought to operate in parallel in both modalities: using either bottom-up, automatic, image-based saliency cues or top-down, attentional, task-dependent cues. Another fundamental similarity is that attention can modulate both
Neural networks of auditory attention
Auditory attention can be selectively directed to a rich variety of acoustic features including spatial location, auditory pitch, frequency or intensity, tone duration, timbre, FM direction or slope, speech versus nonspeech streams, and characteristics of individual voices. Given the multiplicity of acoustic dimensions to which we can attend and the richly interconnected auditory processing networks, there are likely to be multiple neural loci for auditory attention. In fact, the locations of
Summary
Auditory attention involves a distributed network of auditory cortical and subcortical structures that are activated selectively in a task-specific manner during auditory processing, which also integrate with a generalized multisensory attentional network that includes parietal, frontal, and anterior cingulate cortical regions [74, 207, 208, 209, 210]. Recent research has revealed a richly interconnected network for auditory attention that assists in the computation of early auditory features
References and recommended reading
Some articles have been marked as worthy of special interest. All papers in this subjective category are recent (publication within the last five years) and relevant (results making an important contribution to the field of auditory attention).
• Of special interest
Acknowledgement
We gratefully acknowledge funding from NIH R01 DC005779.
Glossary
- A1
- Primary auditory cortex.
- ACC
- Anterior cingulate cortex — medial prefrontal structure likely to be important in control of attention.
- ASA
- Auditory scene analysis — decomposition of complex mixture of incoming sounds into individual sound sources and sound streams.
- ERP
- Event-related brain potentials (averaged EEG segments time-locked to stimulus onset).
- FBD
- Foreground–background decomposition — separation of foreground sound stream of interest from background acoustic scene.
- MMN
- Mismatch negativity — a negative
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