The neuroscience of perception in complex sensory environments

我们生活和工作的环境，无论是在户外还是在办公室里，都充满了吸引我们注意力的景象和声音。 这项研究的目的是确定我们的大脑如何能够理解这些复杂的感官环境。 在复杂场景中实现感知的过程-称为场景分析和选择性注意-在我们的日常生活中非常重要，但科学家只能在有限的情况下研究它们：在安静的实验室中呈现不切实际的简单刺激。 最近，计算机科学的进步使得在实验室环境中再现真实的世界的噪声和杂波的影响成为可能。 这可以通过使用复杂的多扬声器音响系统和多个视频投影仪创建“虚拟”空间来实现。 本提案中所述的设备将使莱斯布里奇大学加拿大行为神经科学中心的心理学家和神经科学家能够利用三维“虚拟”听觉和视觉环境研究现实世界中的感知神经科学。 这些调查将特别感兴趣的科学家谁研究的条件下，在混乱的场景中的感知受损，如听力损失和注意力缺陷障碍。 这些技术也将被洛杉矶大学的计算机科学家使用，他们研究在复杂环境中传达信息的方法。

The environments in which we live and work, whether outdoors or inside an office, are packed with sights and sounds that all compete for our attention.  The goal of the proposed research is to determine how our brains are able to makes sense of these complex sensory environments.  The processes that enable perception in complex scenes - called Scene Analysis and Selective Attention - are of tremendous importance in our everyday lives, but scientists have only been able to investigate them in limited situations: unrealistic simple stimuli presented in a quiet laboratory.  Recently, advances in Computer Science have made it possible to reproduce the effects of noise and clutter of the real world within a laboratory setting.  This can be done by creating "virtual" spaces using sophisticated multi-speaker sound systems and multiple video projectors.  The equipment described in this proposal will enable psychologists and neuroscientists at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge to investigate the neuroscience of perception in real-world situations using  3-D "virtual" auditory and visual environments.  These investigations will be of particular interest to scientists who study conditions in which perception in cluttered scenes is impaired, such as in Age-Related Hearing Loss and Attention Deficit Disorder.   The techniques will also be used by Computer Scientists at the U of L who study ways to convey information in complex environments.