Neural Correlates of Streaming of Complex Sounds

描述（由申请人提供）：这个合作项目结合了心理声学和生理调查的听觉场景分析的基本感知组成部分，称为听觉流。这种现象表现在人类和动物每天都有能力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，在鸡尾酒会上听某人说话，或者在管弦乐队中跟着小提琴演奏，这两种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一个谜。因此，在开发听觉流分离模型的一些尝试仍然是高度投机性的，并且缺乏生理数据来支持它们的配方。这项研究的主要目的是探索人类复杂声音的流动，并研究动物这种能力背后的神经机制。直到最近，在非人类物种的流的神经机制的调查一直受到阻碍的主观知觉现象，如流评估不依赖于内省和语言的困难。基于该领域的最新进展，该项目克服了这一困难，包括作为一个关键因素的开发和使用专门设计的刺激和心理声学任务，以诱导，操纵和客观地评估动物和人类的流。此外，这些刺激和任务的设计方式，有价值的生理数据可以同时收集动物的任务性能。此外，所提出的研究严格调查的假设，从一个混乱的声学环境中的复杂的声音流可以与分离的频谱和时间特征发现在一个更高的水平的表示。具体来说，这些功能的灵感来自生理和心理声学研究的频谱分析的听觉皮层。

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.