Abstract
In everyday social environments, demands on attentional resources dynamically shift to balance our attention to targets of interest while alerting us to important objects in our surrounds. The current study uses electroencephalography to explore how the push-pull interaction between top-down and bottom-up attention manifests itself in dynamic auditory scenes. Using natural soundscapes as distractors while subjects attend to a controlled rhythmic sound sequence, we find that salient events in background scenes significantly suppress phase-locking and gamma responses to the attended sequence, countering enhancement effects observed for attended targets. In line with a hypothesis of limited attentional resources, the modulation of neural activity by bottom-up attention is graded by degree of salience of ambient events. The study also provides insights into the interplay between endogenous and exogenous attention during natural soundscapes, with both forms of attention engaging a common fronto-parietal network at different time lags.
Highlights
Attention is a selection mechanism that deploys our limited neural resources to the most relevant stimuli in the environment
In order to further explore neural underpinnings of changes in the attentional state of listeners, this paradigm is repeated with the easy task while neural activity is measured using Electroencephalography (EEG)
The current study reinforces the view that profound and dynamic changes to neural responses in both sensory and cognitive networks are induced by bottom-up auditory attention
Summary
Attention is a selection mechanism that deploys our limited neural resources to the most relevant stimuli in the environment Without such a process, the sights and sounds of everyday life would overwhelm our senses. We have to balance perception of salient events and objects that we need to be alerted to both for survival as well as awareness of our ever changing surrounds. These various factors guide our attentional resources to dynamically shift in order to shape the representation of sensory information based on its behavioral relevance, and influence how we perceive the world around us
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