Discrimination of communication sounds in auditory scenes

描述（由申请人提供）：有效的声音交流需要能够从背景的干扰声音中检测和区分发声。在人类交流中，一个突出而有效的干扰因素是他人的言语。然而，即使在一个拥挤的房间里，听众也可以把注意力集中在一个演讲者身上，而忽略其他人。听觉处理障碍（APD）是一种中枢听觉系统疾病，影响了多达5%的人口，这种患者分析听觉场景的能力严重受损。APD患者即使听力范围和阈值正常，也无法在轻度嘈杂的听觉场景中说话，这表明该疾病是一种中枢听觉回路，而不是外周感觉。尽管多种行为疗法被用于治疗这种疾病，取得了不同程度的成功，但没有一种是通过理解神经回路如何从复杂的声音环境中提取显著的发声来获得的。斑胸草雀是一种被充分研究过的声音交流动物模型。像人类一样，斑胸草雀在嘈杂的声音环境中自然地识别和区分声音。提出的实验使用行为学、电生理学和计算技术来研究清醒行为的斑胸草雀的听觉系统是如何编码、解码和过滤发声的。这些实验的具体目的是研究1)知觉启动是否影响鸟类对听觉场景的辨别能力；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；3)神经活动是否更密切地跟踪感觉或感知退化的发声。

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.