2023 WNYISPW Presentation: Investigating attention across the auditory system using forward modeling of brain activity
Selective auditory attention—the ability to focus on one sound source in the presence of many others—is an essential part of humans’ ability to communicate verbally. Many studies have demonstrated a strong effect of attention on the way speech is encoded by the auditory cortex. The results of similar studies investigating attention in the auditory brainstem, which receives signals from the inner ear, extracts features such as pitch and location, and passes them on to the cortex, have been much more mixed. Part of what has made these studies difficult is that traditional methods for measuring brainstem responses involve thousands of repetitions of short, artificial sounds, which makes engaging attentional mechanisms difficult. Our lab has developed new methods for using natural, unrepeated speech to measure brainstem activity and investigate attention while listeners perform the ecologically relevant task of listening to one audiobook while ignoring another. Using these
methods, along with custom electrodes which can be placed on the eardrum, we tested the effects of selective attention on the responses of distinct areas of the auditory system, from its initial encoding by the auditory nerve through the brainstem and cortex. We find a strong effect of attention in the cortex, replicating previous studies, but find no evidence of attentional effects in earlier areas of the brain.
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- Date: 03 Nov 2023
- Time: 11:00 AM to 11:30 AM
- All times are (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
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- Rochester, New York
- United States
- Building: RIT Student Development Center
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Speakers
Dr. Ross Maddox