Neural mechanisms of auditory scene analysis

听力是我们日常生活的中心。我们很容易根据音高和位置来区分许多同时发出的声音，但我们对这种能力背后的知觉和神经过程知之甚少。在典型的声学环境中对重叠声音进行分类的过程称为听觉场景分析。从根本上讲，它与我们关注一个听觉来源而忽略其他来源的能力有关。认知神经科学领域开始识别视觉领域中相似过程的神经关联，但在听力方面进展甚微。这里提出的实验将研究听觉系统如何利用空间信息将注意力引导到一个或另一个声音上。结果应该会告诉我们更多关于空间信息如何帮助我们在复杂环境中听力的信息。最终，这些结果可能会对听力受损的各种情况产生重要影响--例如与年龄相关的听力损失，或者当听觉注意力无法正常工作时--例如注意力缺陷障碍。

Hearing is central to our daily lives. We easily differentiate between many simultaneous sounds on the basis of their pitch and location, yet little is known about the perceptual and neural processes that underlie this ability. The process of sorting out the overlapping sounds in a typical acoustic environment is called Auditory Scene Analysis. It is fundametally related to our ability to attend to one auditory source and ignore others. The field of Cognitive Neuroscience is beginning to identify the neural correlates of analagous processes in the visual domain, but has made little progress in audition. The experiments proposed here will investigate how the auditory system makes use of spatial information to direct attention to one or another sound. The results should tell us more about how spatial information helps us to hear in complicated environments. Ultimately these results may have important bearing on a variety of situations in which hearing is compromised - such as in Age-Related Hearing Loss, or when auditory attention fails to work properly - such as Attention-Deficit Disorder.