22 UKRI-SBE: 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. Human and nonhuman animals must prioritize, select, and sustain attention to behaviorally relevant features of sensory signals - and potentially suppress irrelevant features - so that the information conveyed by the signals can be used to guide decisions and actions. This selective attention is crucial to everyday behavior, especially in noisy natural environments, and its breakdown greatly impacts quality of life for many listeners, particularly as we age. Yet, basic questions about how our brain allows us to selectively listen to expected sounds remain unanswered. This project unites the efforts and expertise of UK and USA neuroscientists who study these questions using a number of approaches. Humans and animals will be trained to perform a common listening task, while the team measure brain activity at all levels from single cells to the wider auditory system. By pooling information across powerful and complimentary methods for measuring brain function, the project will provide unique insights how we attend to our environment. The better understanding of selective attention gained through this work may have broad societal impact by guiding transformative improvements to hearing aids and machine listening devices (e.g. closed captioning).