Neural Correlates of Streaming of Complex Sounds

描述（由申请人提供）：这个合作项目结合了听觉场景分析中被称为听觉流的基本感知成分的心理声学和生理研究。这一现象体现在人类和动物的日常能力中，即将来自多个声源的复杂声学信息解析为有意义的听觉“流”。例如，在鸡尾酒会上听别人说话的能力，或者在管弦乐队里听小提琴演奏的能力，似乎都依赖于形成听觉流的能力。虽然看起来毫不费力，但形成听觉流的能力背后的神经机制仍然是个谜。因此，开发听觉流分离模型的少数尝试仍然是高度推测的，并且缺乏生理数据来支持他们的公式。这项研究的主要目的是探索人类复杂声音的流，并研究动物这种能力背后的神经机制。直到最近，对非人类物种流的神经机制的研究一直受到阻碍，因为很难在不依赖内省和语言的情况下评估流这样的主观感知现象。基于该领域的最新进展，该项目克服了这一困难，将开发和使用特殊设计的刺激和心理声学任务作为关键因素，以诱导、操纵和客观评估动物和人类的流。此外，这些刺激和任务的设计方式使有价值的生理数据可以与动物的任务表现同时收集。此外，提出的研究严格调查了这样一个假设，即从杂乱的声环境中流出的复杂声音可能与更高层次表征中发现的光谱和时间特征的分离有关。具体来说，这些特征是受听觉皮层光谱分析的生理和心理声学研究的启发。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This collaborative project combines psychoacoustic and physiological investigations of a fundamental perceptual component of auditory scene analysis known as auditory streaming. This phenomenon manifests itself in the everyday ability of humans and animals to parse complex acoustic information arising from multiple sound sources into meaningful auditory "streams". For instance, the ability to listen to someone at a cocktail party or to follow a violin in the orchestra both seem to rely on the ability to form auditory streams. While seemingly effortless, the neural mechanisms underlying the ability to form auditory streams remain a mystery. Consequently, the few attempts at developing models of auditory stream segregation remain highly speculative, and lack the physiological data to support their formulations. The primary objective of the proposed research is to explore streaming of complex sounds in humans, and to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie this ability in animals. Until recently, the investigation of the neural mechanisms of streaming in non-human species has been hampered by the difficulty of assessing subjective perceptual phenomena like streaming without relying on introspection and language. Building upon recent progress in the area, this project overcomes this difficulty by including as a key ingredient the development and usage of specially designed stimuli and psychoacoustic tasks to induce, manipulate, and objectively assess streaming in both animals and humans. Furthermore, these stimuli and tasks are designed in such a way that valuable physiological data can be collected simultaneously with task performance in animals. Furthermore, the proposed research rigorously investigates the hypothesis that streaming of a complex sound from a cluttered acoustic environment can be associated with segregation of spectral and temporal features found at a higher level of representation. Specifically, these features are inspired by physiological and psychoacoustic studies' of spectrotemporal analysis in the auditory cortex.