Examining the role of a medial olivocochlear reflex elicitor on the attentional modulation of cochlear function

Abstract

Selective attention has been shown to modulate cortical and subcortical neural representations of sound in the auditory systems of humans and research animals. Neuroanatomy of the auditory system suggests that cortical activity is capable of modulating cochlear responses to sound via corticofugal projections to the medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent system. Several human studies using otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) suggest that selective attention can modulate cochlear responses to sound, but results across studies typically show small and inconsistent effects. Recent work in our laboratory has demonstrated much larger effects of cross-modal selective attention on cochlear processing than previously reported, likely due to improved methods for measuring MOC effects. One unanswered question is whether selective attention can modulate cochlear function directly, or whether it only modulates stimulus-elicited MOC activity. Our current study compares OAE magnitudes measured while participants attend to auditor...