Neural mechanisms of semantic guidance of audiovisual attention

项目总结 对于分析我们所遇到的动态的、多感官的和语义丰富的环境，注意力是基本的 在日常生活中。人类的感官系统每时每刻接收的信息都多于所能处理的信息 因此，必须优先处理一个子集，以便通过注意机制进行进一步处理。有关以下内容的信息 同一物体或事件最初可以由多个感官处理，因此来自不同感官的信号 此外，系统还必须匹配和集成，以创建一个连贯的多感官世界的感知。 这些注意力和感觉整合机制的中断被认为是感觉的基础 神经发育障碍(如自闭症、多动症)中常见的处理问题。患者或 对常见的感官刺激反应不足或反应过度，导致痛苦和难以完成任务 日常生活的一部分。这些感觉处理症状背后的机制是不明确的，因为 在我们对注意力如何在多感官环境中运作的理解上存在差距。人们的注意力在很大程度上 在每个感官系统中单独研究，因此许多因素在视听中仍然知之甚少 与我们日常生活中遇到的环境更相似的环境。在拟议的研究中，我将 研究这些因素中的一个，语义，它是视觉中注意力的关键指南，但只是 狭隘地研究视听环境和共享来源的刺激(例如，狗和它的叫声)。这条窄路 焦点是指视听注意受益的机制尚不清楚，可能包括任何语义 关系(语义-通用机制)或特定于共享资源的关系(源- 具体机制)。在目标1中，我将描述语义关联对注意的影响程度 优先顺序，这将通过研究1中的视觉搜索效率和早期视觉中的优先顺序来衡量 研究2中对象位置的大脑皮层。与语义关联程度相关的注意优先顺序将表明 一种语义通用机制。在目标2中，我将确定共享源代码利益的神经机制 视听搜索，具体检查时间进程，以了解注意的相对贡献 和语义处理。研究这些机制将提供对其作用的更有力的理解。 在现实世界环境中引导注意力的语义，而现实世界环境通常既有多感官又有 语义丰富。最终，理解基本的注意原则将支持未来对 感觉处理问题在神经发育疾病中非常常见，包括可能的治疗方法 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.