Effects Of Auditory Attention Research Articles

Listening Behaviors and Musical Coordination in Collective Free Improvisation

While empirical studies on joint music-making have shed light on many aspects of ensemble performance in the past few decades, the role of auditory attention in such a context has remained strikingly understudied. We draw here on a self-annotation methodology to investigate musicians’ listening behaviors in freely improvised performances. Six trios of professional musicians were asked to freely improvise in a recording studio, hearing each other only through headphones. While they were playing, the loudness of each musician as sent to the other two musicians’ headphones was covertly increased/decreased during random periods of time in order to enhance its relative saliency within the musical scene. Immediately after each improvisation, musicians were asked to listen to the improvisation that they had just performed and to continuously indicate, using a specific application, where their listening focus was as they were performing. The results demonstrated that during periods of loudness manipulation, musicians’ attention was significantly drawn to the musician who had been made more salient. Two follow-up studies then investigated the extent to which joint auditory attention correlated with perceived togetherness, as well as whether improvisers’ auditory attention during the performance aligned with that of external listeners attending to the recording of the performance. Taken together, our results suggest that, beyond the effects of saliency, musicians also tend to strategically adapt their listening behavior to the specificities of the interactional context and that musicians’ collective listening behaviors have an impact on the performance, both at an acoustic level and at a perceptual level. By relying on attentional patterns that dynamically emerged from complex, ecological musical interactions, our studies provide a first attempt at assessing the effects of auditory attention on coordination and contribute to establishing sonic interactions as a promising setting for the study of the effects of joint attention.

Mechanical fault diagnosis of gas-insulated switchgear based on saliency feature of auditory brainstem response under noise background

The mechanical fault of gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) seriously threatens the security of the power grid. Recently, acoustic-based fault diagnosis methods, which have the advantage of non-contact measurement, have been applied to the GIS mechanical fault diagnosis, but vulnerable to the interference of the background noise. To improve the capacity of the acoustic-based GIS fault diagnosis under noise background, by simulating the sound feature extraction ability and anti-noise ability of human auditory system, a novel GIS mechanical fault diagnosis method based on saliency feature of auditory brainstem response (SFABR) is proposed. First, an auditory saliency model, which considers both the auditory periphery and the auditory nerve center was constructed by combining the deep auditory model and the saliency model. After processing GIS emitted acoustic signal, the auditory brainstem response (ABR) was obtained, and the saliency features of the ABR were extracted to obtain the SFABR. Then, the characteristic frequency distribution of the auditory saliency model was adjusted to make it more suitable for the spectral characteristics of the GIS sound signal. Finally, the SFABR was mapped to a two-dimensional CNN to train a model for GIS mechanical fault diagnosis. This method simulates the process of auditory response extraction and the selection effect of auditory attention on sound elements. The 110 kV three-phase GIS fault simulation experiment shows that for GIS mechanical faults, the diagnosis method based on SFABR can obtain 96.1% fault identification accuracy. In different noise environments, compared with the traditional acoustic-based fault diagnosis methods, this method has stronger anti-noise performance, and can more effectively realize the identification of GIS mechanical failure types. In future research, the method can be further extended to fault diagnosis of more types of power equipment.

Effect of Auditory Predictability on the Human Peripheral Auditory System.

Auditory perception is facilitated by prior knowledge about the statistics of the acoustic environment. Predictions about upcoming auditory stimuli are processed at various stages along the human auditory pathway, including the cortex and midbrain. Whether such auditory predictions are processed also at hierarchically lower stages—in the peripheral auditory system—is unclear. To address this question, we assessed outer hair cell (OHC) activity in response to isochronous tone sequences and varied the predictability and behavioral relevance of the individual tones (by manipulating tone-to-tone probabilities and the human participants’ task, respectively). We found that predictability alters the amplitude of distortion-product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs, a measure of OHC activity) in a manner that depends on the behavioral relevance of the tones. Simultaneously recorded cortical responses showed a significant effect of both predictability and behavioral relevance of the tones, indicating that their experimental manipulations were effective in central auditory processing stages. Our results provide evidence for a top-down effect on the processing of auditory predictability in the human peripheral auditory system, in line with previous studies showing peripheral effects of auditory attention.

Effects of attention on the speech reception threshold and pupil response of people with impaired and normal hearing

For people with hearing difficulties, following a conversation in a noisy environment requires substantial cognitive processing, which is often perceived as effortful. Recent studies with normal hearing (NH) listeners showed that the pupil dilation response, a measure of cognitive processing load, is affected by ‘attention related’ processes. How these processes affect the pupil dilation response for hearing impaired (HI) listeners remains unknown. Therefore, the current study investigated the effect of auditory attention on various pupil response parameters for 15 NH adults (median age 51 yrs.) and 15 adults with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss (median age 52 yrs.). Both groups listened to two different sentences presented simultaneously, one to each ear and partially masked by stationary noise. Participants had to repeat either both sentences or only one, for which they had to divide or focus attention, respectively. When repeating one sentence, the target sentence location (left or right) was either randomized or blocked across trials, which in the latter case allowed for a better spatial focus of attention. The speech-to-noise ratio was adjusted to yield about 50% sentences correct for each task and condition. NH participants had lower (‘better’) speech reception thresholds (SRT) than HI participants. The pupil measures showed no between-group effects, with the exception of a shorter peak latency for HI participants, which indicated a shorter processing time. Both groups showed higher SRTs and a larger pupil dilation response when two sentences were processed instead of one. Additionally, SRTs were higher and dilation responses were larger for both groups when the target location was randomized instead of fixed. We conclude that although HI participants could cope with less noise than the NH group, their ability to focus attention on a single talker, thereby improving SRTs and lowering cognitive processing load, was preserved. Shorter peak latencies could indicate that HI listeners adapt their listening strategy by not processing some information, which reduces processing time and thereby listening effort.

Systemic Nicotine Increases Gain and Narrows Receptive Fields in A1 via Integrated Cortical and Subcortical Actions.

Nicotine enhances sensory and cognitive processing via actions at nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), yet the precise circuit- and systems-level mechanisms remain unclear. In sensory cortex, nicotinic modulation of receptive fields (RFs) provides a model to probe mechanisms by which nAChRs regulate cortical circuits. Here, we examine RF modulation in mouse primary auditory cortex (A1) using a novel electrophysiological approach: current-source density (CSD) analysis of responses to tone-in-notched-noise (TINN) acoustic stimuli. TINN stimuli consist of a tone at the characteristic frequency (CF) of the recording site embedded within a white noise stimulus filtered to create a spectral “notch” of variable width centered on CF. Systemic nicotine (2.1 mg/kg) enhanced responses to the CF tone and to narrow-notch stimuli, yet reduced the response to wider-notch stimuli, indicating increased response gain within a narrowed RF. Subsequent manipulations showed that modulation of cortical RFs by systemic nicotine reflected effects at several levels in the auditory pathway: nicotine suppressed responses in the auditory midbrain and thalamus, with suppression increasing with spectral distance from CF so that RFs became narrower, and facilitated responses in the thalamocortical pathway, while nicotinic actions within A1 further contributed to both suppression and facilitation. Thus, multiple effects of systemic nicotine integrate along the ascending auditory pathway. These actions at nAChRs in cortical and subcortical circuits, which mimic effects of auditory attention, likely contribute to nicotinic enhancement of sensory and cognitive processing.

Effects of Auditory Attention on Otoacoustic Emissions

In humans, auditory efferent control of the cochlea has been implicated in sharpening of frequency tuning, improved detection of signals in noise, and the ability to switch the focus of auditory attention. However, it remains unknown whether the modulation of efferent activity during an auditory attention task depends on the degree of task difficulty. This study aimed to compare the suppression of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), an objective measure of auditory efferent activation, during a lexical decision task with varying degrees of difficulty, compared with passive auditory listening. Ten normal-hearing 18-35 year-olds were assessed using monosyllabic words and non-words presented in a natural or noise-vocoded (less intelligible) condition. The participants were instructed to press a button every time they heard a non-word. Simultaneously, click evoked-OAEs were obtained from the contralateral ear to the speech stimuli with a probe in the external ear canal. Preliminary results showed that OAEs amplitudes were suppressed during the lexical decision tasks relative to passive listening. In addition, an effect of task difficulty was found, whereby the less intelligible condition showed stronger suppression. These data suggest that the auditory efferent system is recruited through auditory attention, and that this may play a role in speech perception.

The Bilingual Disadvantage in Speech Understanding in Noise Is Likely a Frequency Effect Related to Reduced Language Exposure.

The present study sought to explain why bilingual speakers are disadvantaged relative to monolingual speakers when it comes to speech understanding in noise. Exemplar models of the mental lexicon hold that each encounter with a word leaves a memory trace in long-term memory. Words that we encounter frequently will be associated with richer phonetic representations in memory and therefore recognized faster and more accurately than less frequently encountered words. Because bilinguals are exposed to each of their languages less often than monolinguals by virtue of speaking two languages, they encounter all words less frequently and may therefore have poorer phonetic representations of all words compared to monolinguals. In the present study, vocabulary size was taken as an estimate for language exposure and the prediction was made that both vocabulary size and word frequency would be associated with recognition accuracy for words presented in noise. Forty-eight early Spanish–English bilingual and 53 monolingual English young adults were tested on speech understanding in noise (SUN) ability, English oral verbal ability, verbal working memory (WM), and auditory attention. Results showed that, as a group, monolinguals recognized significantly more words than bilinguals. However, this effect was attenuated by language proficiency; higher proficiency was associated with higher accuracy on the SUN test in both groups. This suggests that greater language exposure is associated with better SUN. Word frequency modulated recognition accuracy and the difference between groups was largest for low frequency words, suggesting that the bilinguals’ insufficient exposure to these words hampered recognition. The effect of WM was not significant, likely because of its large shared variance with language proficiency. The effect of auditory attention was small but significant. These results are discussed within the Ease of Language Understanding model (Rönnberg et al., 2013), which provides a framework for explaining individual differences in SUN.

Attentional modulation of medial olivocochlear inhibition: Evidence for immaturity in children

Efferent feedback shapes afferent auditory processing. Auditory attention has been shown to modulate medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent activity in human adults. Since auditory attention continues to develop throughout childhood, the present study explored whether attentional control of medial-efferent inhibition in 5–10 year-old children is adult-like. MOC inhibition was measured in adults (n = 14) and children (n = 12) during no-task (contralateral broadband noise), passive (contralateral noise with tone-pips) and active listening conditions (attended tone-pips embedded in contralateral broadband noise). A stronger MOC inhibition was observed when measured during the active listening condition for adults which is consistent with past work. However, the effect of auditory attention on MOC inhibition in children was not robust and was significantly lower compared to that observed for adults. These findings suggest the potential immaturity of the attentional mediation of MOC inhibition in tested children.

Electrophysiological evidence for altered visual, but not auditory, selective attention in adolescent cochlear implant users

ObjectiveSelective attention fundamentally alters sensory perception, but little is known about the functioning of attention in individuals who use a cochlear implant. This study aimed to investigate visual and auditory attention in adolescent cochlear implant users. MethodsEvent related potentials were used to investigate the influence of attention on visual and auditory evoked potentials in six cochlear implant users and age-matched normally-hearing children. Participants were presented with streams of alternating visual and auditory stimuli in an oddball paradigm: each modality contained frequently presented ‘standard’ and infrequent ‘deviant’ stimuli. Across different blocks attention was directed to either the visual or auditory modality. ResultsFor the visual stimuli attention boosted the early N1 potential, but this effect was larger for cochlear implant users. Attention was also associated with a later P3 component for the visual deviant stimulus, but there was no difference between groups in the later attention effects. For the auditory stimuli, attention was associated with a decrease in N1 latency as well as a robust P3 for the deviant tone. Importantly, there was no difference between groups in these auditory attention effects. ConclusionThe results suggest that basic mechanisms of auditory attention are largely normal in children who are proficient cochlear implant users, but that visual attention may be altered. Ultimately, a better understanding of how selective attention influences sensory perception in cochlear implant users will be important for optimising habilitation strategies.

Neuroimaging Evidence for Top-Down Maturation of Selective Auditory Attention

This study investigated maturational differences of selective auditory attention effects on transient evoked responses and 40-Hz auditory steady-state responses between children and adults. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was recorded from children and adults performing a task where they attended to 40-Hz amplitude-modulated (AM) tones of 1,200Hz while ignoring 40-Hz AM tones of 800Hz. By using standard dipole-modeling procedures, the N1m of the transient evoked fields and the 40-Hz ASSRs were localized to secondary and primary auditory cortices, respectively. Source waveforms for the transient evoked fields and ASSRs were reconstructed at these locations and compared between attended and unattended tones. Source waveforms revealed attention enhances the sustained negativity of the transient evoked responses in both adults and children around 250 and 400ms. ASSRs were also found to be enhanced within this time range but only for adults. The results provide evidence for a limited role of attention modification of the 40-Hz ASSRs in children around the age of 12years old. Because ASSRs are generated in a lower auditory processing stage as compared to the transient auditory evoked responses, findings from the present study could indicate that the maturation of attention progresses in top-to-bottom manner. These findings fit with the notion that as a person gains sensory experience selective gating of relevant from irrelevant information likely occurs at earlier and earlier processing levels in order to become more automatic and efficient.

Effect of subject task on contralateral suppression of click evoked otoacoustic emissions

Contralateral suppression of click evoked otoacoustic emissions (CEOAEs) is widely used as a non-invasive measure of the activity of the (uncrossed) medial olivocochlear bundle (MOCB). There is evidence that the uMOCB receives descending input from the cortex, potentially mediating top–down control during higher order processing. This study investigated whether the contralateral suppression measure is affected by top–down influences during different tasks performed by the participants during recording. Suppression of CEOAEs evoked at 50 and 60 dB SPL was measured under four different task conditions: (1) no task; (2) passive visual (watching a silent subtitled DVD); (3) active visual (responding to visually presented sums); (4) active auditory (detecting tone pips embedded in the evoking click train). The most significant effect of task was found on the recording noise, with both the passive visual and the active auditory task producing significantly lower noise levels than the no task condition. In the passive visual task, this was associated with a reduced inter-subject variability, which enhanced the effect size relative to the no task condition. A main effect of subject task was also found on the change in CEOAE I/O slope due to contralateral noise. This effect reflected a significantly smaller suppression during the active auditory task compared to the no task condition, leading to a reduced effect size. No significant difference in suppression strength between the no task condition and the two non-auditory tasks was observed, suggesting that the main effect of task reflects a specific effect of auditory attention. The data suggest that MOCB activity is inhibited due to top–down influences when selective attention is focussed on the ipsilateral ear.

Effect of context on identification of environmental sounds

This study investigated the role of auditory context in identifying individual environmental sounds. Limited previous research has not demonstrated a facilitatory influence of context on sound identification comparable to the benefits grammatical context provides for identifying speech sounds. Unlike some previous studies, in which context was determined by sound presented sequentially before and after the target environmental sound, in the present experiments the sounds to be identified were mixed in with a background of naturally occurring auditory scenes, such as the ambience of a beach or a street. Thirty-one familiar environmental sounds from previous environmental sounds studies were presented mixed either with congruent scenes (such as hammering at a construction site) or incongruent scenes (such as a horse galloping in a restaurant). The sounds were presented at signal-to-background ratios of −12 and −16 dB and trained listeners identified them using three-letter codes. Results indicate auditory context had a small but significant effect on identification performance. However, contrary to expectations, the sounds were identified more accurately in incongruent scenes (55% correct) rather than congruent ones (46% correct). The differential effects of auditory attention in determining foreground and background sounds will be discussed in connection with the results.

The effects of auditory attention measured from human electrocorticograms

Objective A central question in auditory electrophysiology has been whether selective attention can modulate exogenous components of the scalp-recorded N1 (the ‘N1 effect’). Intracranial electrocorticograms were used in the current work to investigate this issue in greater anatomical detail. Methods Data were recorded from subdural electrodes placed across temporal cortex in 6 patient-volunteers undergoing diagnostic procedures for medically intractable epilepsy. Patients performed a dichotic listening task in which they alternately attended to a series of tones presented to both ears (mean ISI 800 ms) by responding to rare frequency deviants. Results Effects of attention were measured on the largest negative and positive waveform deflections observed between 70 and 220 ms post-stimulus for stimuli presented contralateral to grid location. Peak deflections were most often recorded from the upper bank of the posterior superior temporal gyrus at approximately 89 and 173 ms on average (labeled N90stg and P170stg, respectively). Selective attention had little effect on peak latencies but significantly increased the N90stg for 3 subjects, increased the P170stg for two subjects, and decreased the P170stg for two other subjects. Conclusions Selective auditory attention can modulate neural response in auditory cortex. Significance The effects of attention on the scalp-recorded N1 component may arise in part from the enhancement of exogenous responses in temporal cortex.

Linguistic processing in visual and modality-nonspecific brain areas: PET recordings during selective attention

Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to investigate the neural basis of selective processing of linguistic material during concurrent presentation of multiple stimulus streams (“cocktail-party effect”). Fifteen healthy right-handed adult males were to attend to one of three simultaneously presented messages: one presented visually, one to the left ear, and one to the right ear. During the control condition, subjects attended to visually presented consonant letter strings and ignored auditory messages. This paper reports the modality-nonspecific language processing and visual word-form processing, whereas the auditory attention effects have been reported elsewhere [Cogn. Brain Res. 17 (2003) 201]. The left-hemisphere areas activated by both the selective processing of text and speech were as follows: the inferior prefrontal (Brodmann's area, BA 45, 47), anterior temporal (BA 38), posterior insular (BA 13), inferior (BA 20) and middle temporal (BA 21), occipital (BA 18/30) cortices, the caudate nucleus, and the amygdala. In addition, bilateral activations were observed in the medial occipito-temporal cortex and the cerebellum. Decreases of activation during both text and speech processing were found in the parietal (BA 7, 40), frontal (BA 6, 8, 44) and occipito-temporal (BA 37) regions of the right hemisphere. Furthermore, the present data suggest that the left occipito-temporal cortex (BA 18, 20, 37, 21) can be subdivided into three functionally distinct regions in the posterior–anterior direction on the basis of their activation during attentive processing of sublexical orthography, visual word form, and supramodal higher-level aspects of language.

Developmental event-related gamma oscillations: effects of auditory attention.

This study describes maturational changes in topographical patterns, stability, and functional reactivity of auditory gamma band (31-63 Hz) responses (GBRs) as brain electrical correlates relevant for cognitive development during childhood. GBRs of 114 healthy children from 9 to 16 years were elicited in an auditory focused attention task requiring motor responding to targets, and analyzed by means of the wavelet transform (WT). The effects of age and task variables (attended side and stimulus type relevance) were examined for GBR power and phase-locking within 120 ms after stimulation. Similar to the spontaneous gamma band power, the power and phase-synchronization of GBRs did not depend on the age. However, the functional reactivity of GBRs at specific locations changed in the course of development. In 9-12-year-old children, GBRs at frontal locations were larger and better synchronized to target than to nontarget stimulus type, and were larger over the left hemisphere (contralateral to the responding hand), thus manifesting sensitivity to external stimulus features and motor task. In 13-16-year-old adolescents, GBRs at parietal sites were enhanced by active attending to the side of stimulation, thus being associated with a maintenance of attentional focus to stimulus location. The results indicate that (i) specific aspects of task-stimulus processing engage distinct spatially localized gamma networks at functionally relevant areas, and (ii) the neuronal substrates of gamma band networks and the ability to synchronize them in relation to task-specific processes are available in all age groups from 9 to 16 years. However, the mode and efficiency with which gamma networks can be entrained depends on the age. This age-dependent reactivity of GBRs to different task variables may reflect a transition in processing strategies emerging at approximately 12-13 years in relation to the maturation of cognitive and executive brain functions.

Effect of auditory attention on the speed of pitch recognition of a tone.

Effect of auditory attention on the speed of pitch recognition of a tone.

Attention-related modulation of activity in primary and secondary auditory cortex.

We investigated the effects of auditory attention on brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects listened to three word lists, three times each, and were instructed to count the number of times they heard a target word during two of these presentations. For the third, they listened to the words without counting. All subjects showed significant areas of activation in auditory cortex during the listening conditions compared to rest. There was significantly more activation and a larger area of activation, particularly in association cortex, in the left temporal lobe during counting of targets compared to the no-target conditions, with a similar trend in the right hemisphere. These results provide evidence of an attention-related enhancement of both activation magnitude and extent in auditory cortex.

Selective auditory attention effects in tonotopically organized cortical areas: A topographic ERP study

AbstractThis study reinvestigates some aspects of the neurophysiological mechanisms of auditory selective attention, by testing the hypothesis that auditory attention can exert a selective control over the sensory processing of acoustic stimuli in tonotopic auditory cortex. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from human subjects while they listened selectively to a tone sequence in one ear and ignored a concurrent sequence of a different frequency in the opposite ear. The tone frequencies were 500, 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 Hz in separate sequences, and were delivered at a constant rate of one every 800 ms. The effects of attention were analyzed in the difference waves obtained by subtracting ERPs to ignore tones from those of the same tones when attended. The earliest effect of attention (70–80 ms post‐stimulus) was found to present the same spatio‐temporal organization as the obligatory, sensory‐evoked N1 wave, with similar tonotopic changes in scalp distribution with the tone frequencies. At longer latencies, two other attentional effects were observed, of probable endogenous origin: one around 175 ms post‐stimulus, possibly originating from non‐tonotropic auditory cortex, and the latest one (after 300 ms) from non‐specific areas. The results support the hypothesis of a genuine sensory gating mechanism for auditory attention, taking place in tonotopic auditory cortex at an early stage of sensory processing, even in low attentional load conditions. © 1995 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.