Neural mechanisms of semantic guidance of audiovisual attention

项目摘要 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。人类的感觉系统每时每刻接收的信息都比能够处理的要多 因此，必须通过注意力机制对子集进行优先级排序，以便进行进一步处理。信息 同一个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 系统还必须匹配和整合，以创造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障碍的基础。 通常在神经发育障碍中观察到的处理问题（例如，自闭症、多动症）。例患者 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 日常生活中。这些感觉处理症状的机制是不明确的，因为关键 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 在每个感官系统内分别进行研究，因此许多因素在视听系统中仍然知之甚少。 更接近于我们在日常生活中遇到的环境。在研究中，我将 研究这些因素之一，语义，这是一个关键的指导，注意力在视觉上，但只有 在具有共享源的刺激的视听环境中狭义地研究（例如，狗和它的“树皮”。这种狭隘 聚焦意味着视听注意力益处的机制仍然未知，并且可以包括任何语义 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搜索中的优先级来衡量。 在研究2中的对象位置处的皮质。与语义相关性相关的注意力优先顺序表明， 语义通用机制。在目标2中，我将确定共享源利益的神经机制， 视听搜索，特别是检查时间过程，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 在真实的世界环境中，语义在引导注意力方面的作用， 语义丰富。最终，了解基本的注意力原则将支持未来的研究， 神经发育疾病中常见的感觉处理问题，包括允许 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.