Neural mechanisms of auditory scene analysis

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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.