Attentive Tracking of Sound Sources
Attentive Tracking of Sound Sources
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.043
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发表时间：
2015-08-31
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
McDermott, Josh H.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Woods, Kevin J. P.;McDermott, Josh H.
听觉场景通常包含并发的声源，但听众通常只对其中一个感兴趣，并且必须以某种方式选择它进行进一步处理。一个挑战是诸如语音的真实世界声音随时间变化，并且因此通常不能基于其特征的特定值（例如，高音调）。在这里，我们表明，人类听众可以绕过这一挑战，跟踪声音与移动的注意力。我们合成了一对音调和音色在随机、交织的轨迹上发生变化的声音，缺乏区别特征或语言信息。听众事先被提示注意其中一个声音。我们通过随后呈现一个声音的结尾部分并询问它是否来自提示声音来测量他们从混合物中提取这个提示声音的能力。我们发现，听众可以执行这项任务，但性能介导的注意力，听众谁表现最好也更敏感的扰动，在线索的声音比在uncooked声音。此外，如果源轨迹在特征空间中没有保持足够的分离，则该任务是不可能的。结果表明，注意力的轨迹可以通过特征空间跟随声音的轨迹，这可能有助于在类似的干扰物中进行选择和隔离。
Auditory scenes often contain concurrent sound sources, but listeners are typically interested in just one of these and must somehow select it for further processing. One challenge is that real-world sounds such as speech vary over time and as a consequence often cannot be separated or selected based on particular values of their features (e.g., high pitch). Here we show that human listeners can circumvent this challenge by tracking sounds with a movable focus of attention. We synthesized pairs of voices that changed in pitch and timbre over random, intertwined trajectories, lacking distinguishing features or linguistic information. Listeners were cued beforehand to attend to one of the voices. We measured their ability to extract this cued voice from the mixture by subsequently presenting the ending portion of one voice and asking whether it came from the cued voice. We found that listeners could perform this task but that performance was mediated by attention-listeners who performed best were also more sensitive to perturbations in the cued voice than in the uncued voice. Moreover, the task was impossible if the source trajectories did not maintain sufficient separation in feature space. The results suggest a locus of attention that can follow a sound's trajectory through a feature space, likely aiding selection and segregation amid similar distractors.