Sensory Integration and Neural Plasticity of Audition

人脑是地球上最复杂的系统之一。在过去的世纪里，自然科学和工程学领域的研究工作一直在努力了解大脑的功能。虽然在阐明感觉和认知过程的关键功能方面取得了显着的进展，但经典范式提供了人类认知的不完整画面，就像观看拼图游戏的孤立部分无法捕捉它们可以形成的美丽景观一样。例如，选择性注意就是这样一个关键部分：它从环境中所有可用的信息中选择与任务相关的特征。选择性注意是我们在所谓的“鸡尾酒会”情况下，通过动态跟踪相关的听觉信息，（声音、背景噪音）和视觉信息（嘴唇动作，面部和身体姿势），将它们与内部知识相结合（语言的语义结构，对话的上下文）和选择适当的运动命令（例如，当说话者交替或同时出现源时，最佳地定向一个人的身体在空间中）。

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).