On the influence of individual memory schemata on non-speech auditory processing - A neuroscientific perspective

听觉感知不是一种纯粹的刺激驱动的自下而上的机制。事实上，代表个人经历的记忆图式使其成为一个主观和建设性的过程。特别是，现有的记忆图式直接有助于我们获得实际的听觉感知，并且似乎也增加了听觉事件成为注意力焦点的机会。这在复杂的听觉场景中是很明显的，比如一段熟悉的音乐或自己的手机铃声，而其他不熟悉的声音却没有被注意到。尽管这些现象对个体记忆图式对听觉感知的影响毫无疑问，但我们对大脑中潜在机制的经验知识相对较少。最近主要使用脑电图（EEG）的研究开始解决这个问题，并确定了与个人重要的非言语声音感知相关的加工的不同阶段。然而，到目前为止，只能对这些处理阶段的特征做出有限的推断，特别是关于它们的非自愿性质。本项目旨在研究个体图式驱动的听觉加工，特别是在视觉或并发听觉输入竞争加工资源的加工能力有限的情况下。我们还将进一步探讨先前发现的效果是否具体表明对个人重要声音的处理，或者是否涉及更一般的、非特定的相关性检测机制。脑磁图（MEG）将取代脑电图（EEG）来表征加工的不同阶段，不仅在时间尺度上，而且还可以识别解释图式驱动的听觉感知的神经结构。

Auditory perception is not a purely stimulus-driven, bottom-up mechanism. In fact, memory schemata that represent individual experiences make it a subjective and constructive process. In particular, existing memory schemata directly contribute to the actual acoustic percept we get and also seem to enhance the chance of an auditory event to get into the focus of attention. This is obvious in complex auditory scenes when sounds such as a familiar piece of music or the ringing of the own phone are heard while other unfamiliar, yet acoustically similar sounds remain unnoticed. Although, these phenomena leave no doubt on the impact of individual memory schemata on auditory perception, we have relatively little empirical knowledge about the underlying mechanisms in the brain. Recent studies which mainly used electroencephalography (EEG) started to address this issue and identified different stages of processing associated with the perception of a personally significant, non-speech sound. However, only limited inferences on the characteristics of these stages of processing can be made so far, especially regarding their involuntary nature. The proposed project aims to study individual schema-driven auditory processing particularly in situations of limited processing capacity when visual or concurrent auditory input competes for processing resources. It will furthermore be explored whether previously found effects specifically indicate the processing of a personally significant sound or whether a more general, unspecific relevance detection mechanism is involved. Instead of EEG, magnetoencephalography (MEG) shall be applied to characterize the different stages of processing not only on a temporal scale but also to identify the neural structures that account for schema-driven auditory perception.