Interactions of scene analysis, short-term memory, and attention for auditory perceptual awareness

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Auditory perceptual awareness reflects only part of the acoustic information available from different sound sources in crowded environments. Which part of the acoustic information reaches perceptual awareness depends on scene analysis mechanisms, short-term memory, and the automatic and voluntary orienting of attention. This study aims at further delineating which cortical networks involved in these processes are necessary and sufficient for auditory perceptual awareness. In the first part, auditory-cortex representations of tone streams under informational masking are probed systematically using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and source analysis techniques. Next, auditory short-term memory for frequency-change detection will be explored with and without perceptual awareness of the leading tone stream. The second part of the study is focused on the separation of perceptual detection per se and the behavioral report of the percept. To this end, an experimental setup will be established to estimate the occurrence of perceptual and volitional events based on phasic pupil dilation using camera-based eyetracking. This setup will be used together with MEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study tone detection in noise and self-initiated orienting of attention with and without overt responses of the participants.