Sensory Integration and Neural Plasticity of Audition

人脑是地球上最复杂的系统之一。在过去的一个世纪里，自然科学和工程学各学科的研究努力都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著进展，但经典范式提供了一幅关于人类认知的不完整图景，就像观看拼图游戏的孤立碎片无法捕捉到它们可以形成的美丽风景一样。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。在所谓的“鸡尾酒会”情境中，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、面部和肢体动作)，将它们与内部知识(语言的语义结构、对话的语境)相结合，并选择适当的运动指令(例如，当说话者交替或同时出现时，最佳地在空间中定位一个人的身体)，选择性注意奠定了我们在所谓的“鸡尾酒会”情景中关注众多对话的非凡能力。

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).