Neural correlates of auditory attention

Abstract

Bert Scharf's seminal studies on selective auditory attention were, in many ways, ahead of the times. Twenty years ago, many psychoacousticians viewed any consideration of cognitive factors or effects driven by the intent of the listener, rather than the acoustics of the input, as outside of their realm of interest. However, today, a plethora of laboratories are exploring questions about what acoustic features enable listeners to focus attention, how bottom-up stimulus attributes interact with top-down control signals to determine what source a listener attends in a mixture of sources, and what neural mechanisms realize such selective auditory attention. This talk reviews recent work exploring selective auditory attention using a combination of behavioral studies and neuro-imaging techniques, all of which suggest that 1) listeners can focus attention on one, and only one, auditory object or stream at a time, and 2) executive control regions of the brain are engaged during attention to reduce across-object interference in the representation of whatever object is in the attentional foreground. These studies underscore the importance of auditory attention in allowing us to communicate in everyday settings containing multiple sound sources, and thus the foresight of Bert in tackling this problem when most others did not. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.