Neural Correlates of Streaming of Complex Sounds

描述(由申请者提供)：这个合作项目结合了心理声学和生理研究，对听觉场景分析的一个基本感知成分，称为听觉串流。这一现象表现在人类和动物的日常能力上，他们能够将来自多个声源的复杂声学信息解析成有意义的听觉“流”。例如，在鸡尾酒会上听别人说话的能力或在管弦乐队中跟着小提琴演奏的能力似乎都依赖于形成听觉流的能力。虽然看似毫不费力，但形成听觉信息流的能力背后的神经机制仍然是一个谜。因此，开发听觉流分离模型的少数尝试仍然是高度推测的，并且缺乏支持其公式的生理数据。这项拟议的研究的主要目标是探索复杂声音在人类中的流动，并研究动物这种能力背后的神经机制。直到最近，在非人类物种中对心流的神经机制的研究一直受到阻碍，因为很难在不依赖内省和语言的情况下评估像心流这样的主观感知现象。在该领域最新进展的基础上，该项目克服了这一困难，将开发和使用专门设计的刺激和心理声学任务作为关键因素，以诱导、操纵和客观评估动物和人类的心流。此外，这些刺激和任务的设计使得有价值的生理数据可以与动物的任务表现同时收集。此外，拟议的研究严格调查了这样一个假设，即从杂乱的声学环境中串流复杂的声音可以与在较高表示水平上发现的频谱和时间特征的分离相关联。具体地说，这些特征的灵感来自于听觉皮质频谱分析的生理学和心理声学研究。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This collaborative project combines psychoacoustic and physiological investigations of a fundamental perceptual component of auditory scene analysis known as auditory streaming. This phenomenon manifests itself in the everyday ability of humans and animals to parse complex acoustic information arising from multiple sound sources into meaningful auditory "streams". For instance, the ability to listen to someone at a cocktail party or to follow a violin in the orchestra both seem to rely on the ability to form auditory streams. While seemingly effortless, the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to form auditory streams remain a mystery. Consequently, the few attempts at developing models of auditory stream segregation remain highly speculative, and lack the physiological data to support their formulations. The primary objective of the proposed research is to explore streaming of complex sounds in humans, and to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie this ability in animals. Until recently, the investigation of the neural mechanisms of streaming in non-human species has been hampered by the difficulty of assessing subjective perceptual phenomena like streaming without relying on introspection and language. Building upon recent progress in the area, this project overcomes this difficulty by including as a key ingredient the development and usage of specially designed stimuli and psychoacoustic tasks to induce, manipulate, and objectively assess streaming in both animals and humans. Furthermore, these stimuli and tasks are designed in such a way that valuable physiological data can be collected simultaneously with task performance in animals. Furthermore, the proposed research rigorously investigates the hypothesis that streaming of a complex sound from a cluttered acoustic environment can be associated with segregation of spectral and temporal features found at a higher level of representation. Specifically, these features are inspired by physiological and psychoacoustic studies' of spectrotemporal analysis in the auditory cortex.