Discrimination of communication sounds in auditory scenes

描述（由申请人提供）：有效的语音交流需要能够从分散注意力的声音背景中检测和区分发声。在人类交流中，一个突出而有效的干扰物是他人的言语。然而，即使在一个拥挤的房间里，听众也可以专注于一个演讲者，而忽略其他人。这种解析听觉场景的能力在听觉处理障碍（APD）患者中严重受损，APD是一种影响多达5%人口的中枢听觉系统疾病。APD患者在轻度噪声的听觉场景中无法注意言语，即使他们的听力范围和阈值正常，这表明该疾病是中枢听觉回路而不是外周感觉的疾病之一。虽然多种行为疗法被用于治疗这种疾病，并取得了不同的成功，但没有一种疗法是通过了解神经回路如何从复杂的声学环境中提取突出的发声来获得信息的。斑胸草雀是一种被广泛研究的声音交流动物模型。像人类一样，斑胸草雀在嘈杂的声学环境中自然地识别和区分发声。拟议的实验使用行为，电生理和计算技术来研究如何发声的编码，解码和过滤的听觉系统的清醒，行为斑胸草雀。这些实验的具体目的是研究1）知觉启动是否影响鸟类在听觉场景中的辨别能力; 2）行为良好的动物和单个神经元如何区分嵌入在分散注意力的背景中的发声;以及3）神经活动是否更密切地跟踪退化发声的感觉或感知。 公共卫生相关性：通过了解单个神经元和神经回路如何处理交流声音，我们可以开始开发数据驱动的方法来治疗APD等中枢听觉障碍。这些实验应该产生信息的原则，了解神经回路如何编码复杂的感觉信号，以及如何过滤嘈杂的感觉信息，以创建一个有行为意义的感觉世界的神经表征。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Effective vocal communication requires the ability to detect and discriminate vocalizations from a background of distracting sounds. A prominent and effective distractor in human communication is the speech of others. However, even in a crowded room, a listener can focus on a single speaker and ignore the rest of the crowd. This ability to parse an auditory scene is severely impaired in patients with auditory processing disorder (APD), a central auditory system malady that affects as much as 5% of the population. Patients with APD are unable to attend to speech in mildly noisy auditory scenes even though their hearing ranges and thresholds are normal, suggesting that the disorder is one of central auditory circuits rather than of peripheral sensation. Although multiple behavioral therapies are used for treatment of the disorder with varying success, none are informed by an understanding of how neural circuits extract salient vocalizations from complex acoustic environments. The zebra finch is a well-studied animal model of vocal communication. Like humans, zebra finches naturally recognize and discriminate among vocalizations in noisy acoustic environments. The proposed experiments use behavioral, electrophysiological and computational techniques to investigate how vocalizations are encoded, decoded and filtered in the auditory system of the awake, behaving zebra finch. The specific aims of these experiments are to study 1) whether perceptual priming influences birds' abilities to discriminate in auditory scenes; 2) how well behaving animals and single neurons discriminate among vocalizations embedded in a distracting background; and 3) whether neural activity more closely tracks the sensation or the perception of degraded vocalizations. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: By understanding how single neurons and neural circuits process communication sounds, we can begin to develop data-driven approaches for treating central auditory disorders such as APD. These experiments should yield informative principles for understanding how neural circuits encode complex sensory signals and how noisy sensory information is filtered to create a behaviorally meaningful neural representation of the sensory world.