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

在熙熙攘攘的咖啡馆里偷听八卦，通过托儿所监视器追踪生病孩子的呼吸质量，以及在沙沙作响的树叶中聆听老鼠的高音吱吱声，所有这些都依赖于听觉选择性注意。人类和动物必须优先考虑、选择并持续关注相关声音，并可能抑制不相关的声音，以指导决策和行动。这种选择性注意力引导我们的倾听能力，对日常行为至关重要，尤其是在嘈杂的环境中，它的崩溃极大地影响了许多听众的生活质量，尤其是随着年龄的增长。然而，尽管听觉选择性注意是人类的一项基本能力，但我们对它的认知和神经生物学基础知之甚少。更好地理解选择性注意力将通过指导机器听力和下一代助听器的改进而产生广泛的社会影响。这一跨大西洋合作伙伴关系还将开发多个教育推广计划，包括制作有关认知神经科学和听觉注意力在听力中的重要性的视频。这些视频将广泛传播并链接到 NSF 的课堂资源和英国的 BBSRC 学校和年轻人网站。 这个两国合作项目将来自美国和英国的五个实验室联系起来，开展听觉选择性注意的跨领域行为和神经生物学研究。该项目利用了学习和注意力之间的相互作用：当声音频繁出现时，听众更容易在噪音中发现它们，并在决策中更快地做出反应。这表明构成自然世界的丰富的感官信号模式可能有助于引导注意力。该项目将包括对人类和动物模型（雪貂 - 其听力图和听力与人类非常相似）的听觉注意力的研究。该项目将跨物种方法与一对简单的听觉任务（一系列频谱频率的持续时间检测和间隔检测）结合起来，每个任务都提供了独特的机会来了解声学刺激统计中的输入规律如何引导人们对特定声音或声音质量的关注。这项研究的一个新颖之处是，使用一系列互补的神经生物学技术的并行研究将提供从单个神经元到整个大脑活动的多个分析水平的测量，这些测量将被整合到选择性听觉注意的综合图像中。该项目将使用脑电图（EEG）、磁共振成像（MRI）、功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）、高密度电生理学和神经外科患者的颅内记录来测试关于大脑皮层对声音的反应如何受到声学背景和经验影响的相互竞争的假设。这项研究可能会为我们对听觉选择性注意的神经基础的理解带来新的见解和进展，这对于听力至关重要。该提案是根据 SBE-UKRI 牵头机构机会授予的。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.