Sensory Integration and Neural Plasticity of Audition

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The human brain is one of the most complex systems on Earth. Research efforts across the disciplines of the natural sciences and engineering have striven to understand brain function over the last century. While remarkable progress has been made in elucidating key functions underlying sensory and cognitive processes, classical paradigms provide an incomplete picture of human cognition, very much like viewing isolated pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fails to capture the beautiful landscape they can form. Selective attention for instance is one such critical piece: it selects task-relevant features from all the information available in the environment. Selective attention underlies our remarkable ability to attend to one conversation among many in a so-called “cocktail party” situation, by dynamically tracking relevant auditory (voices, background noise) and visual information (lip movements, face and body gestures), integrating them with internal knowledge (semantic structure of the language, context of the conversation) and selecting proper motor commands (such as optimally orienting one’s body in space when speakers alternate or concurrent sources appear).