Discrimination of communication sounds in auditory scenes

描述(由申请者提供)：有效的语音交流需要具备从干扰声音的背景中检测和辨别发声的能力。在人类交流中，一个重要且有效的干扰因素就是他人的言语。然而，即使在拥挤的房间里，听众也可以专注于一个发言者，而忽略人群中的其他人。这种分析听觉场景的能力在患有听觉处理障碍(Apd)的患者中严重受损，这是一种影响多达5%人口的中枢听觉系统疾病。即使听力范围和阈值正常，动作障碍患者也无法在轻度嘈杂的听觉场景中注意语言，这表明该障碍是中枢听觉回路而不是外周感觉障碍之一。尽管多种行为疗法被用于治疗这种疾病，取得了不同的成功，但没有一种疗法是通过了解神经电路如何从复杂的声学环境中提取显著发声来获得信息的。斑马雀是一种被广泛研究的声音交流动物模型。像人类一样，斑马雀在嘈杂的声音环境中自然地识别和区分发声。拟议中的实验使用行为、电生理和计算技术来研究发声是如何在清醒、行为良好的斑马雀的听觉系统中编码、解码和过滤的。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)表现良好的动物和单个神经元对嵌入在分心背景中的发声的辨别能力如何；3)神经活动是否更密切地跟踪感觉或对退化发声的感知。 与公共健康相关：通过了解单个神经元和神经回路是如何处理交流声音的，我们可以开始开发数据驱动的方法来治疗中枢性听觉障碍，如动作障碍。这些实验应该为理解神经电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对感觉世界的行为有意义的神经表示而产生信息性原则。

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.