Attention, awareness, and the perception of auditory scenes.

Joel S Snyder,Claude Alain,David M Weintraub,Melissa K Gregg

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00015

Abstract

Auditory perception and cognition entails both low-level and high-level processes, which are likely to interact with each other to create our rich conscious experience of soundscapes. Recent research that we review has revealed numerous influences of high-level factors, such as attention, intention, and prior experience, on conscious auditory perception. And recently, studies have shown that auditory scene analysis tasks can exhibit multistability in a manner very similar to ambiguous visual stimuli, presenting a unique opportunity to study neural correlates of auditory awareness and the extent to which mechanisms of perception are shared across sensory modalities. Research has also led to a growing number of techniques through which auditory perception can be manipulated and even completely suppressed. Such findings have important consequences for our understanding of the mechanisms of perception and also should allow scientists to precisely distinguish the influences of different higher-level influences.

Highlights

Understanding conscious experience of the external world has been a pursuit of theorists since the early days of experimental psychology
Theorists have made an important contribution to reviving the scientific study of consciousness, perhaps most notably by defining accessible empirical problems such as how to explain the generation of perceptual awareness or consciousness (Crick and Koch, 1995, 2003), which we operationally define as the explicit reporting of a particular stimulus or how it is perceptually organized
Researchers have investigated the role of particular brain areas (Leopold and Logothetis, 1999; Tong et al, 2006; Donner et al, 2008) and particular neural processes such as feedback from higher to lower areas (Pascual-Leone and Walsh, 2001; Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002; Lamme, 2004; Wibral et al, 2009) that are associated with visual awareness

Summary

Introduction

Understanding conscious experience of the external world has been a pursuit of theorists since the early days of experimental psychology. While several studies have investigated the role that attention plays in auditory stream segregation, which we review below, far less research has been done on the impact of high-level factors on concurrent sound segregation.

Results

Conclusion