Neural mechanisms of semantic guidance of audiovisual attention

项目概要 注意力是解析我们遇到的动态、多感官和语义丰富的环境的基础 在日常生活中。人类感觉系统每时每刻接收的信息多于可处理的信息 立即，因此必须优先考虑一个子集，以便通过注意力机制进行进一步处理。有关信息 同一物体或事件最初可以由多个感觉器官处理，因此来自不同感觉器官的信号 系统还必须进行匹配和集成，以创建连贯的多感官世界的感知。 这些注意力和感觉统合机制的破坏被认为是感觉障碍的基础。 神经发育障碍（例如自闭症、多动症）中常见的处理问题。患者要么 对常见的感官刺激反应不足或过度反应，导致痛苦和难以完成任务 的日常生活。由于关键因素，这些感觉处理症状背后的机制尚不明确。 我们对注意力在多感官环境中如何运作的理解存在差距。注意力主要集中在 在每个感觉系统中分别进行研究，因此视听中的许多因素仍然知之甚少 更接近我们日常生活中遇到的环境。在拟议的研究中，我将 研究这些因素之一，即语义，它是视觉注意力的关键指南，但仅被研究过。 在视听环境中狭隘地研究具有共享来源的刺激（例如，狗和它的吠声）。这个狭窄的 焦点意味着视听注意力益处的机制仍然未知，并且可能包括任何语义 关系（语义通用机制）或特定于共享源的关系（源- 具体机制）。在目标 1 中，我将描述语义相关性影响注意力的程度 优先级，这将通过研究 1 中的视觉搜索效率和早期视觉中的优先级来衡量 研究 2 中物体位置的皮层。与语义相关性成比例的注意优先顺序表明 语义通用机制。在目标 2 中，我将确定共享源收益的神经机制 视听搜索，专门检查时间过程以了解注意力的相对贡献 和语义处理。研究这些机制将有助于更深入地了解其作用 语义在现实世界环境中引导注意力的作用，这些环境通常是多感官和多感官的 语义丰富。最终，理解基本的注意力原理将支持未来的研究 感觉处理问题在神经发育疾病中很常见，包括潜在的治疗方法 患者更好地管理感觉反应不足和过度反应。

PROJECT SUMMARY Attention is fundamental to parsing the dynamic, multisensory, and semantically rich environments we encounter in day-to-day life. The human sensory systems take in more information each moment than can be processed at once, so a subset must be prioritized for further processing through attentional mechanisms. Information about the same object or event can be initially processed by multiple sensory organs, so signals from different sensory systems must additionally be matched and integrated to create the perception of a coherent multisensory world. Disruptions to these attention and sensory integration mechanisms are thought to underlie the sensory processing issues commonly observed in neurodevelopment disorders (e.g., autism, ADHD). Patients either under-respond or over-respond to common sensory stimuli, causing distress and difficulty completing the tasks of daily life. The mechanisms underlying these sensory processing symptoms are ill defined because of critical gaps in our understanding of how attention operates in multisensory environments. Attention has largely been studied within each sensory system separately, thus many factors remain poorly understood in the audiovisual contexts that more closely resemble the environments we encounter in daily life. In the proposed research, I will investigate one of these factors, semantics, which is a critical guide of attention in vision but has only been studied narrowly in audiovisual contexts with stimuli that shared a source (e.g., a dog and its' bark). This narrow focus means the mechanism of audiovisual attention benefit remains unknown and could include any semantic relationship (a semantic-general mechanism) or be specific to the relationship of sharing a source (a source- specific mechanism). In Aim 1, I will characterize the degree to which semantic relatedness influences attentional prioritization, which will be measured both by visual search efficiency in study 1 and prioritization in early visual cortex at object locations in study 2. Attentional prioritization that scales with semantic relatedness would suggest a semantic-general mechanism. In Aim 2, I will identify the neural mechanism of the shared-source benefit in audiovisual search, specifically examining the time course to understand the relative contributions of attentional and semantic processing. Investigating these mechanisms will provide a more robust understanding of the role of semantics in guiding attention in real world environments, which are frequently both multisensory and semantically rich. Ultimately, understanding basic attentional principles will support future research into the sensory processing issues so common in neurodevelopment disease, including potential treatments that allow patients to better manage sensory under- and over-responsiveness.