Cognitive resources are distributed among the entire auditory landscape in auditory scene analysis

Symonds, Renee M.; Zhou, Juin W.; Cole, Sally; Brace, Kelin M.; Sussman, Elyse

doi:10.1111/psyp.13487

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 68 publications

(123 reference statements)

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“…Another explanation is that the pattern deviants themselves may have evoked some attentional (passive) awareness to the unattended pattern, which may have negated any enhancement to the attended. That is, the brain was multitasking between attended and unattended pattern deviance detection (Miller et al, 2015 ; Sussman, 2017 ; Symonds et al, 2020 ; Brace and Sussman, 2021 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Brain Tracks Multiple Predictions About the Auditory Scene

Brace

Sussman

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The predictable rhythmic structure is important to most ecologically relevant sounds for humans, such as is found in the rhythm of speech or music. This study addressed the question of how rhythmic predictions are maintained in the auditory system when there are multiple perceptual interpretations occurring simultaneously and emanating from the same sound source. We recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) while presenting participants with a tone sequence that had two different tone feature patterns, one based on the sequential rhythmic variation in tone duration and the other on sequential rhythmic variation in tone intensity. Participants were presented with the same sound sequences and were instructed to listen for the intensity pattern (ignore fluctuations in duration) and press a response key to detected pattern deviants (attend intensity pattern task); to listen to the duration pattern (ignore fluctuations in intensity) and make a button press to duration pattern deviants (attend duration pattern task), and to watch a movie and ignore the sounds presented to their ears (attend visual task). Both intensity and duration patterns occurred predictably 85% of the time, thus the key question involved evaluating how the brain treated the irrelevant feature patterns (standards and deviants) while performing an auditory or visual task. We expected that task-based feature patterns would have a more robust brain response to attended standards and deviants than the unattended feature patterns. Instead, we found that the neural entrainment to the rhythm of the standard attended patterns had similar power to the standard of the unattended feature patterns. In addition, the infrequent pattern deviants elicited the event-related brain potential called the mismatch negativity component (MMN). The MMN elicited by task-based feature pattern deviants had a similar amplitude to MMNs elicited by unattended pattern deviants that were unattended because they were not the target pattern or because the participant ignored the sounds and watched a movie. Thus, these results demonstrate that the brain tracks multiple predictions about the complexities in sound streams and can automatically track and detect deviations with respect to these predictions. This capability would be useful for switching attention rapidly among multiple objects in a busy auditory scene.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Brain Tracks Multiple Predictions About the Auditory Scene

Brace

Sussman

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Stream segregation is considered a pre-attentive process, that is applied to incoming sounds even if they are outside the focus of attention (Sussman, 2017; Symonds et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, in some situations listeners attempt to pay attention to only one speaker and ignore all other sounds (“Selective Attention”), whereas other contexts require listeners to distribute their attention among several sound sources and monitor them all for potentially relevant information (“Distributed Attention”). Implementing either of these listening strategies in multi-speaker context arguably relies first on segregating the mixture into distinct speech streams (Bregman, 1990; Yabe et al, 2001) which is considered a pre-attentive process (Sussman, 2017; Symonds et al, 2019). Top-down attention can then be applied to the segregated streams to decide and prioritize which portion (or portions) of the acoustic scene will be further processed at a linguistic level (Best et al, 2010, 2006; Broadbent, 1958; Cherry, 1953), in accordance with behavioral goals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

Pinto

Agmon

2020

Preprint

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Processing speech in multi-speaker environments poses substantial challenges to the human perceptual and attention system. Moreover, different contexts may require employing different listening strategies. For instance, in some cases individuals pay attention Selectively to one speaker and attempt to ignore all other task-irrelevant sounds, whereas other contexts may require listeners to Distribute their attention among several speakers. Spatial and spectral acoustic cues both play an important role in assisting listeners to segregate concurrent speakers. However, how these cues interact with varying demands for allocating top-down attention is less clear. In the current study, we test and compare how spatial cues are utilized to benefit performance on these different types of attentional tasks. To this end, participants listened to a concoction of two or four speakers, presented either as emanating from different locations in space or with no spatial separation. In separate trials, participants were required to employ different listening strategies, and detect a target-word spoken either by one pre-defined speaker (Selective Attention) or spoken by any of the speakers (Distributed Attention). Results indicate that the presence of spatial cues improved performance, particularly in the two-speaker condition, which is in line with the important role of spatial cues in stream segregation. However, spatial cues provided similar benefits to performance under Selective and Distributed attention. This pattern suggests that despite the advantage of spatial cues for stream segregation, they were nonetheless insufficient for directing a more focused ‘attentional spotlight’ towards the location of a designated speaker in the Selective attention condition.

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“…Another explanation is that the pattern deviants themselves may have evoked some attentional (passive) awareness to the unattended pattern, which may have negated any enhancement to the attended. That is, the brain was multitasking between attended and unattended pattern deviance detection (Miller et al, 2015;Sussman, 2017;Symonds et al, 2020;Brace and Sussman, 2021).…”

Section: Attention Effects and Multitaskingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cognitive resources are distributed among the entire auditory landscape in auditory scene analysis

Abstract: To listen successfully in noisy environments, individuals must selectively attend to relevant sounds amid a myriad of irrelevant background sounds. Although it has been demonstrated that selective attention can enhance neural representations of the attended sounds (

Cited by 6 publications

References 68 publications

The Brain Tracks Multiple Predictions About the Auditory Scene

The Brain Tracks Multiple Predictions About the Auditory Scene

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

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