The neuroscience of perception in complex sensory environments

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The environments in which we live and work, whether outdoors or inside an office, are packed with sights and sounds that all compete for our attention.  The goal of the proposed research is to determine how our brains are able to makes sense of these complex sensory environments.  The processes that enable perception in complex scenes - called Scene Analysis and Selective Attention - are of tremendous importance in our everyday lives, but scientists have only been able to investigate them in limited situations: unrealistic simple stimuli presented in a quiet laboratory.  Recently, advances in Computer Science have made it possible to reproduce the effects of noise and clutter of the real world within a laboratory setting.  This can be done by creating "virtual" spaces using sophisticated multi-speaker sound systems and multiple video projectors.  The equipment described in this proposal will enable psychologists and neuroscientists at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge to investigate the neuroscience of perception in real-world situations using  3-D "virtual" auditory and visual environments.  These investigations will be of particular interest to scientists who study conditions in which perception in cluttered scenes is impaired, such as in Age-Related Hearing Loss and Attention Deficit Disorder.   The techniques will also be used by Computer Scientists at the U of L who study ways to convey information in complex environments.