SBE-UKRI: Contextually and probabilistically weighted auditory selective attention: from neurons to networks

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Eavesdropping on gossip in a bustling cafe, tracking the quality of a sick child’s breathing through a nursery monitor, and listening for the high-pitched squeak of a mouse amongst rustling leaves all rely upon auditory selective attention. Humans and animals must prioritize, select, and sustain attention to relevant sounds – and potentially suppress irrelevant sounds – to guide decisions and actions. This selective attention guides our ability to listen, and is crucial to everyday behavior, especially in noisy environments, and its breakdown greatly impacts quality of life for many listeners, particularly as we age. Yet, despite being a fundamental human ability, we know relatively little about the cognitive and neurobiological basis of auditory selective attention. A better understanding of selective attention will have broad societal impact by guiding improvements to machine listening and next-generation hearing aids. This transatlantic partnership will also develop multiple educational outreach programs that include the creation of videos about cognitive neuroscience and the importance of auditory attention in hearing. These videos will be widely disseminated and linked to NSF’s Classroom Resources and the UK’s BBSRC Schools and Young People sites. This binational, collaborative project links five laboratories from the United States and the United Kingdom to undertake cross-cutting behavioral and neurobiological research on auditory selective attention. The project capitalizes on interactions between learning and attention: when sounds occur frequently, listeners detect them more readily in noise and respond to them more quickly in decision making. This suggests that the rich patterns of sensory signals structuring the natural world may help to direct attention. The project will include studies of auditory attention in humans and also in an animal model (the ferret - whose audiogram and hearing is very similar to humans). The project unifies cross-species approaches with a pair of simple auditory tasks (duration detection and interval detection across a range of spectral frequencies), each of which provides unique opportunities to understand how input regularities in acoustic stimulus statistics direct attention to specific sounds or qualities of sounds. A novel aspect of this research is that parallel studies, using an array of complementary neurobiological techniques, will provide measurements over multiple levels of analysis from single neurons to whole brain activity, that will be integrated into a comprehensive picture of selective auditory attention. The project will use electroencephalography (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), high-density electrophysiology, and intracranial recordings from neurosurgical patients, to test competing hypotheses about how the brain’s cortical response to sound is shaped by acoustic context and experience. This research is likely to lead to new insights and advances in our understanding of the neural basis of auditory selective attention, which is crucial for hearing.This proposal is awarded under the SBE-UKRI Lead Agency Opportunity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.