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Patro C, Monfiletto A, Singer A, Srinivasan NK, Mishra SK. Midlife Speech Perception Deficits: Impact of Extended High-Frequency Hearing, Peripheral Neural Function, and Cognitive Abilities. Ear Hear 2024; 45:1149-1164. [PMID: 38556645 DOI: 10.1097/aud.0000000000001504] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/02/2024]
Abstract
OBJECTIVES The objectives of the present study were to investigate the effects of age-related changes in extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing, peripheral neural function, working memory, and executive function on speech perception deficits in middle-aged individuals with clinically normal hearing. DESIGN We administered a comprehensive assessment battery to 37 participants spanning the age range of 20 to 56 years. This battery encompassed various evaluations, including standard and EHF pure-tone audiometry, ranging from 0.25 to 16 kHz. In addition, we conducted auditory brainstem response assessments with varying stimulation rates and levels, a spatial release from masking (SRM) task, and cognitive evaluations that involved the Trail Making test (TMT) for assessing executive function and the Abbreviated Reading Span test (ARST) for measuring working memory. RESULTS The results indicated a decline in hearing sensitivities at EHFs and an increase in completion times for the TMT with age. In addition, as age increased, there was a corresponding decrease in the amount of SRM. The declines in SRM were associated with age-related declines in hearing sensitivity at EHFs and TMT performance. While we observed an age-related decline in wave I responses, this decline was primarily driven by age-related reductions in EHF thresholds. In addition, the results obtained using the ARST did not show an age-related decline. Neither the auditory brainstem response results nor ARST scores were correlated with the amount of SRM. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that speech perception deficits in middle age are primarily linked to declines in EHF hearing and executive function, rather than cochlear synaptopathy or working memory.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chhayakanta Patro
- Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA
| | - Angela Monfiletto
- Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA
| | - Aviya Singer
- Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA
| | - Nirmal Kumar Srinivasan
- Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA
| | - Srikanta Kumar Mishra
- Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
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2
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de Gee JW, Mridha Z, Hudson M, Shi Y, Ramsaywak H, Smith S, Karediya N, Thompson M, Jaspe K, Jiang H, Zhang W, McGinley MJ. Strategic stabilization of arousal boosts sustained attention. Curr Biol 2024:S0960-9822(24)01009-1. [PMID: 39151432 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.07.070] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/18/2023] [Revised: 07/17/2024] [Accepted: 07/18/2024] [Indexed: 08/19/2024]
Abstract
Arousal and motivation interact to profoundly influence behavior. For example, experience tells us that we have some capacity to control our arousal when appropriately motivated, such as staying awake while driving a motor vehicle. However, little is known about how arousal and motivation jointly influence decision computations, including if and how animals, such as rodents, adapt their arousal state to their needs. Here, we developed and show results from an auditory, feature-based, sustained-attention task with intermittently shifting task utility. We use pupil size to estimate arousal across a wide range of states and apply tailored signal-detection theoretic, hazard function, and accumulation-to-bound modeling approaches in a large cohort of mice. We find that pupil-linked arousal and task utility both have major impacts on multiple aspects of task performance. Although substantial arousal fluctuations persist across utility conditions, mice partially stabilize their arousal near an intermediate and optimal level when task utility is high. Behavioral analyses show that multiple elements of behavior improve during high task utility and that arousal influences some, but not all, of them. Specifically, arousal influences the likelihood and timescale of sensory evidence accumulation but not the quantity of evidence accumulated per time step while attending. In sum, the results establish specific decision-computational signatures of arousal, motivation, and their interaction in attention. So doing, we provide an experimental and analysis framework for studying arousal self-regulation in neurotypical brains and in diseases such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jan Willem de Gee
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, Amsterdam 1098 XH, the Netherlands; Research Priority Area Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, Amsterdam 1098 XH, the Netherlands.
| | - Zakir Mridha
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Marissa Hudson
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Yanchen Shi
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Hannah Ramsaywak
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Spencer Smith
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Nishad Karediya
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Matthew Thompson
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Kit Jaspe
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Hong Jiang
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Wenhao Zhang
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA
| | - Matthew J McGinley
- Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, 1 Baylor Plaza, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute, Texas Children's Hospital, 1250 Moursund Street, Houston, TX 77030, USA; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
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3
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Di Tullio RW, Wei L, Balasubramanian V. Slow and steady: auditory features for discriminating animal vocalizations. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.06.20.599962. [PMID: 39005308 PMCID: PMC11244870 DOI: 10.1101/2024.06.20.599962] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/16/2024]
Abstract
We propose that listeners can use temporal regularities - spectro-temporal correlations that change smoothly over time - to discriminate animal vocalizations within and between species. To test this idea, we used Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) to find the most temporally regular components of vocalizations from birds (blue jay, house finch, American yellow warbler, and great blue heron), humans (English speakers), and rhesus macaques. We projected vocalizations into the learned feature space and tested intra-class (same speaker/species) and inter-class (different speakers/species) auditory discrimination by a trained classifier. We found that: 1) Vocalization discrimination was excellent (> 95%) in all cases; 2) Performance depended primarily on the ~10 most temporally regular features; 3) Most vocalizations are dominated by ~10 features with high temporal regularity; and 4) These regular features are highly correlated with the most predictable components of animal sounds.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ronald W Di Tullio
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Computational Neuroscience Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, USA
| | - Linran Wei
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylkvania, USA
| | - Vijay Balasubramanian
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Computational Neuroscience Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
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Joshi N, Ng Y, Thakkar K, Duque D, Yin P, Fritz J, Elhilali M, Shamma S. Temporal Coherence Shapes Cortical Responses to Speech Mixtures in a Ferret Cocktail Party. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.05.21.595171. [PMID: 38915590 PMCID: PMC11195067 DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.21.595171] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/26/2024]
Abstract
Segregation of complex sounds such as speech, music and animal vocalizations as they simultaneously emanate from multiple sources (referred to as the "cocktail party problem") is a remarkable ability that is common in humans and animals alike. The neural underpinnings of this process have been extensively studied behaviorally and physiologically in non-human animals primarily with simplified sounds (tones and noise sequences). In humans, segregation experiments utilizing more complex speech mixtures are common; but physiological experiments have relied on EEG/MEG/ECoG recordings that sample activity from thousands of neurons, often obscuring the detailed processes that give rise to the observed segregation. The present study combines the insights from animal single-unit physiology with segregation of speech-like mixtures. Ferrets were trained to attend to a female voice and detect a target word, both in presence or absence of a concurrent, equally salient male voice. Single neuron recordings were obtained from primary and secondary ferret auditory cortical fields, as well as frontal cortex. During task performance, representation of the female words became more enhanced relative to those of the (distractor) male in all cortical regions, especially in the higher auditory cortical field. Analysis of the temporal and spectral response characteristics during task performance reveals how speech segregation gradually emerges in the auditory cortex. A computational model evaluated on the same voice mixtures replicates and extends these results to different attentional targets (attention to female or male voices). These findings are consistent with the temporal coherence theory whereby attention to a target voice anchors neural activity in cortical networks hence binding together channels that are coherently temporally-modulated with the target, and ultimately forming a common auditory stream.
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Affiliation(s)
- Neha Joshi
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland College Park, MD
| | - Yu Ng
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland College Park, MD
| | - Karran Thakkar
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, The Johns Hopkins University, MD
| | - Daniel Duque
- Institute of Neuroscience of Castilla Y León, University of Salamanca
| | - Pingbo Yin
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park, MD
| | | | - Mounya Elhilali
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, The Johns Hopkins University, MD
| | - Shihab Shamma
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland College Park, MD
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park, MD
- Départment d'étude cognitives, école normale supérieure, PSL, Paris
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5
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Lu K, Dutta K, Mohammed A, Elhilali M, Shamma S. Temporal-Coherence Induces Binding of Responses to Sound Sequences in Ferret Auditory Cortex. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.05.21.595170. [PMID: 38854125 PMCID: PMC11160575 DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.21.595170] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/11/2024]
Abstract
Binding the attributes of a sensory source is necessary to perceive it as a unified entity, one that can be attended to and extracted from its surrounding scene. In auditory perception, this is the essence of the cocktail party problem in which a listener segregates one speaker from a mixture of voices, or a musical stream from simultaneous others. It is postulated that coherence of the temporal modulations of a source's features is necessary to bind them. The focus of this study is on the role of temporal-coherence in binding and segregation, and specifically as evidenced by the neural correlates of rapid plasticity that enhance cortical responses among synchronized neurons, while suppressing them among asynchronized ones. In a first experiment, we find that attention to a sound sequence rapidly binds it to other coherent sequences while suppressing nearby incoherent sequences, thus enhancing the contrast between the two groups. In a second experiment, a sequence of synchronized multi-tone complexes, embedded in a cloud of randomly dispersed background of desynchronized tones, perceptually and neurally pops-out after a fraction of a second highlighting the binding among its coherent tones against the incoherent background. These findings demonstrate the role of temporal-coherence in binding and segregation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kai Lu
- Emory University Medical School
| | - Kelsey Dutta
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department & Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park
| | - Ali Mohammed
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department & Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park
| | - Mounya Elhilali
- Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University
| | - Shihab Shamma
- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department & Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park
- Départment d'étude Cognitives, école normale supérieure, PSL
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van der Heijden K, Patel P, Bickel S, Herrero JL, Mehta AD, Mesgarani N. Joint population coding and temporal coherence link an attended talker's voice and location features in naturalistic multi-talker scenes. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.05.13.593814. [PMID: 38798551 PMCID: PMC11118436 DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.13.593814] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2024]
Abstract
Listeners readily extract multi-dimensional auditory objects such as a 'localized talker' from complex acoustic scenes with multiple talkers. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying simultaneous encoding and linking of different sound features - for example, a talker's voice and location - are poorly understood. We analyzed invasive intracranial recordings in neurosurgical patients attending to a localized talker in real-life cocktail party scenarios. We found that sensitivity to an individual talker's voice and location features was distributed throughout auditory cortex and that neural sites exhibited a gradient from sensitivity to a single feature to joint sensitivity to both features. On a population level, cortical response patterns of both dual-feature sensitive sites but also single-feature sensitive sites revealed simultaneous encoding of an attended talker's voice and location features. However, for single-feature sensitive sites, the representation of the primary feature was more precise. Further, sites which selective tracked an attended speech stream concurrently encoded an attended talker's voice and location features, indicating that such sites combine selective tracking of an attended auditory object with encoding of the object's features. Finally, we found that attending a localized talker selectively enhanced temporal coherence between single-feature voice sensitive sites and single-feature location sensitive sites, providing an additional mechanism for linking voice and location in multi-talker scenes. These results demonstrate that a talker's voice and location features are linked during multi-dimensional object formation in naturalistic multi-talker scenes by joint population coding as well as by temporal coherence between neural sites. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Listeners effortlessly extract auditory objects from complex acoustic scenes consisting of multiple sound sources in naturalistic, spatial sound scenes. Yet, how the brain links different sound features to form a multi-dimensional auditory object is poorly understood. We investigated how neural responses encode and integrate an attended talker's voice and location features in spatial multi-talker sound scenes to elucidate which neural mechanisms underlie simultaneous encoding and linking of different auditory features. Our results show that joint population coding as well as temporal coherence mechanisms contribute to distributed multi-dimensional auditory object encoding. These findings shed new light on cortical functional specialization and multidimensional auditory object formation in complex, naturalistic listening scenes. HIGHLIGHTS Cortical responses to an single talker exhibit a distributed gradient, ranging from sites that are sensitive to both a talker's voice and location (dual-feature sensitive sites) to sites that are sensitive to either voice or location (single-feature sensitive sites).Population response patterns of dual-feature sensitive sites encode voice and location features of the attended talker in multi-talker scenes jointly and with equal precision.Despite their sensitivity to a single feature at the level of individual cortical sites, population response patterns of single-feature sensitive sites also encode location and voice features of a talker jointly, but with higher precision for the feature they are primarily sensitive to.Neural sites which selectively track an attended speech stream concurrently encode the attended talker's voice and location features.Attention selectively enhances temporal coherence between voice and location selective sites over time.Joint population coding as well as temporal coherence mechanisms underlie distributed multi-dimensional auditory object encoding in auditory cortex.
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7
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Boncz Á, Szalárdy O, Velősy PK, Béres L, Baumgartner R, Winkler I, Tóth B. The effects of aging and hearing impairment on listening in noise. iScience 2024; 27:109295. [PMID: 38558934 PMCID: PMC10981015 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109295] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/24/2023] [Revised: 09/19/2023] [Accepted: 02/16/2024] [Indexed: 04/04/2024] Open
Abstract
The study investigates age-related decline in listening abilities, particularly in noisy environments, where the challenge lies in extracting meaningful information from variable sensory input (figure-ground segregation). The research focuses on peripheral and central factors contributing to this decline using a tone-cloud-based figure detection task. Results based on behavioral measures and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicate that, despite delayed perceptual processes and some deterioration in attention and executive functions with aging, the ability to detect sound sources in noise remains relatively intact. However, even mild hearing impairment significantly hampers the segregation of individual sound sources within a complex auditory scene. The severity of the hearing deficit correlates with an increased susceptibility to masking noise. The study underscores the impact of hearing impairment on auditory scene analysis and highlights the need for personalized interventions based on individual abilities.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ádám Boncz
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Orsolya Szalárdy
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
- Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Péter Kristóf Velősy
- Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Luca Béres
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
- Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Robert Baumgartner
- Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
| | - István Winkler
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
| | - Brigitta Tóth
- Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
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8
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Zhao S, Contadini-Wright C, Chait M. Cross-Modal Interactions Between Auditory Attention and Oculomotor Control. J Neurosci 2024; 44:e1286232024. [PMID: 38331581 PMCID: PMC10941240 DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.1286-23.2024] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/11/2023] [Revised: 01/28/2024] [Accepted: 01/31/2024] [Indexed: 02/10/2024] Open
Abstract
Microsaccades are small, involuntary eye movements that occur during fixation. Their role is debated with recent hypotheses proposing a contribution to automatic scene sampling. Microsaccadic inhibition (MSI) refers to the abrupt suppression of microsaccades, typically evoked within 0.1 s after new stimulus onset. The functional significance and neural underpinnings of MSI are subjects of ongoing research. It has been suggested that MSI is a component of the brain's attentional re-orienting network which facilitates the allocation of attention to new environmental occurrences by reducing disruptions or shifts in gaze that could interfere with processing. The extent to which MSI is reflexive or influenced by top-down mechanisms remains debated. We developed a task that examines the impact of auditory top-down attention on MSI, allowing us to disentangle ocular dynamics from visual sensory processing. Participants (N = 24 and 27; both sexes) listened to two simultaneous streams of tones and were instructed to attend to one stream while detecting specific task "targets." We quantified MSI in response to occasional task-irrelevant events presented in both the attended and unattended streams (frequency steps in Experiment 1, omissions in Experiment 2). The results show that initial stages of MSI are not affected by auditory attention. However, later stages (∼0.25 s postevent onset), affecting the extent and duration of the inhibition, are enhanced for sounds in the attended stream compared to the unattended stream. These findings provide converging evidence for the reflexive nature of early MSI stages and robustly demonstrate the involvement of auditory attention in modulating the later stages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sijia Zhao
- Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, United Kingdom
| | | | - Maria Chait
- Ear Institute, University College London, London WC1X 8EE, United Kingdom
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9
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Viswanathan V, Heinz MG, Shinn-Cunningham BG. Impact of Reduced Spectral Resolution on Temporal-Coherence-Based Source Segregation. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.03.11.584489. [PMID: 38586037 PMCID: PMC10998286 DOI: 10.1101/2024.03.11.584489] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/09/2024]
Abstract
Hearing-impaired listeners struggle to understand speech in noise, even when using cochlear implants (CIs) or hearing aids. Successful listening in noisy environments depends on the brain's ability to organize a mixture of sound sources into distinct perceptual streams (i.e., source segregation). In normal-hearing listeners, temporal coherence of sound fluctuations across frequency channels supports this process by promoting grouping of elements belonging to a single acoustic source. We hypothesized that reduced spectral resolution-a hallmark of both electric/CI (from current spread) and acoustic (from broadened tuning) hearing with sensorineural hearing loss-degrades segregation based on temporal coherence. This is because reduced frequency resolution decreases the likelihood that a single sound source dominates the activity driving any specific channel; concomitantly, it increases the correlation in activity across channels. Consistent with our hypothesis, predictions from a physiologically plausible model of temporal-coherence-based segregation suggest that CI current spread reduces comodulation masking release (CMR; a correlate of temporal-coherence processing) and speech intelligibility in noise. These predictions are consistent with our behavioral data with simulated CI listening. Our model also predicts smaller CMR with increasing levels of outer-hair-cell damage. These results suggest that reduced spectral resolution relative to normal hearing impairs temporal-coherence-based segregation and speech-in-noise outcomes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Vibha Viswanathan
- Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pitttsburgh, PA 15213
| | - Michael G. Heinz
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907
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10
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Calcus A. Development of auditory scene analysis: a mini-review. Front Hum Neurosci 2024; 18:1352247. [PMID: 38532788 PMCID: PMC10963424 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1352247] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/07/2023] [Accepted: 02/22/2024] [Indexed: 03/28/2024] Open
Abstract
Most auditory environments contain multiple sound waves that are mixed before reaching the ears. In such situations, listeners must disentangle individual sounds from the mixture, performing the auditory scene analysis. Analyzing complex auditory scenes relies on listeners ability to segregate acoustic events into different streams, and to selectively attend to the stream of interest. Both segregation and selective attention are known to be challenging for adults with normal hearing, and seem to be even more difficult for children. Here, we review the recent literature on the development of auditory scene analysis, presenting behavioral and neurophysiological results. In short, cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting stream segregation are functional from birth but keep developing until adolescence. Similarly, from 6 months of age, infants can orient their attention toward a target in the presence of distractors. However, selective auditory attention in the presence of interfering streams only reaches maturity in late childhood at the earliest. Methodological limitations are discussed, and a new paradigm is proposed to clarify the relationship between auditory scene analysis and speech perception in noise throughout development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Axelle Calcus
- Center for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience (CRCN), ULB Neuroscience Institute (UNI), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
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11
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Noyce AL, Varghese L, Mathias SR, Shinn-Cunningham BG. Perceptual organization and task demands jointly shape auditory working memory capacity. JASA EXPRESS LETTERS 2024; 4:034402. [PMID: 38526127 PMCID: PMC10966505 DOI: 10.1121/10.0025392] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/17/2023] [Accepted: 03/08/2024] [Indexed: 03/26/2024]
Abstract
Listeners performed two different tasks in which they remembered short sequences comprising either complex tones (generally heard as one melody) or everyday sounds (generally heard as separate objects). In one, listeners judged whether a probe item had been present in the preceding sequence. In the other, they judged whether a second sequence of the same items was identical in order to the preceding sequence. Performance on the first task was higher for everyday sounds; performance on the second was higher for complex tones. Perceptual organization strongly shapes listeners' memory for sounds, with implications for real-world communication.
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Affiliation(s)
- Abigail L Noyce
- Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA
| | - Leonard Varghese
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
| | - Samuel R Mathias
- Department of Psychiatry, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, , , ,
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Mok BA, Viswanathan V, Borjigin A, Singh R, Kafi H, Bharadwaj HM. Web-based psychoacoustics: Hearing screening, infrastructure, and validation. Behav Res Methods 2024; 56:1433-1448. [PMID: 37326771 PMCID: PMC10704001 DOI: 10.3758/s13428-023-02101-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 03/01/2023] [Indexed: 06/17/2023]
Abstract
Anonymous web-based experiments are increasingly used in many domains of behavioral research. However, online studies of auditory perception, especially of psychoacoustic phenomena pertaining to low-level sensory processing, are challenging because of limited available control of the acoustics, and the inability to perform audiometry to confirm normal-hearing status of participants. Here, we outline our approach to mitigate these challenges and validate our procedures by comparing web-based measurements to lab-based data on a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. Individual tasks were created using jsPsych, an open-source JavaScript front-end library. Dynamic sequences of psychoacoustic tasks were implemented using Django, an open-source library for web applications, and combined with consent pages, questionnaires, and debriefing pages. Subjects were recruited via Prolific, a subject recruitment platform for web-based studies. Guided by a meta-analysis of lab-based data, we developed and validated a screening procedure to select participants for (putative) normal-hearing status based on their responses in a suprathreshold task and a survey. Headphone use was standardized by supplementing procedures from prior literature with a binaural hearing task. Individuals meeting all criteria were re-invited to complete a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. For the re-invited participants, absolute thresholds were in excellent agreement with lab-based data for fundamental frequency discrimination, gap detection, and sensitivity to interaural time delay and level difference. Furthermore, word identification scores, consonant confusion patterns, and co-modulation masking release effect also matched lab-based studies. Our results suggest that web-based psychoacoustics is a viable complement to lab-based research. Source code for our infrastructure is provided.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brittany A Mok
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Vibha Viswanathan
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Agudemu Borjigin
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Ravinderjit Singh
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Homeira Kafi
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Hari M Bharadwaj
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
- Department of Communication Science and Disorders, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
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13
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Kreeger LJ, Honnuraiah S, Maeker S, Shea S, Fishell G, Goodrich LV. An Anatomical and Physiological Basis for Coincidence Detection Across Time Scales in the Auditory System. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.02.29.582808. [PMID: 38464181 PMCID: PMC10925315 DOI: 10.1101/2024.02.29.582808] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/12/2024]
Abstract
Coincidence detection is a common neural computation that identifies co-occurring stimuli by integration of inputs. In the auditory system, octopus cells act as coincidence detectors for complex sounds that include both synchronous and sequenced combinations of frequencies. Octopus cells must detect coincidence on both the millisecond and submillisecond time scale, unlike the average neuron, which integrates inputs over time on the order of tens of milliseconds. Here, we show that octopus cell computations in the cell body are shaped by inhibition in the dendrites, which adjusts the strength and timing of incoming signals to achieve submillisecond acuity. This mechanism is crucial for the fundamental process of integrating the synchronized frequencies of natural auditory signals over time.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lauren J Kreeger
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Suraj Honnuraiah
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
| | - Sydney Maeker
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Siobhan Shea
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Gord Fishell
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
| | - Lisa V Goodrich
- Harvard Medical School, Department of Neurobiology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
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14
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Gao J, Chen H, Fang M, Ding N. Original speech and its echo are segregated and separately processed in the human brain. PLoS Biol 2024; 22:e3002498. [PMID: 38358954 PMCID: PMC10868781 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002498] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/11/2023] [Accepted: 01/15/2024] [Indexed: 02/17/2024] Open
Abstract
Speech recognition crucially relies on slow temporal modulations (<16 Hz) in speech. Recent studies, however, have demonstrated that the long-delay echoes, which are common during online conferencing, can eliminate crucial temporal modulations in speech but do not affect speech intelligibility. Here, we investigated the underlying neural mechanisms. MEG experiments demonstrated that cortical activity can effectively track the temporal modulations eliminated by an echo, which cannot be fully explained by basic neural adaptation mechanisms. Furthermore, cortical responses to echoic speech can be better explained by a model that segregates speech from its echo than by a model that encodes echoic speech as a whole. The speech segregation effect was observed even when attention was diverted but would disappear when segregation cues, i.e., speech fine structure, were removed. These results strongly suggested that, through mechanisms such as stream segregation, the auditory system can build an echo-insensitive representation of speech envelope, which can support reliable speech recognition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jiaxin Gao
- Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
| | - Honghua Chen
- Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
| | - Mingxuan Fang
- Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
| | - Nai Ding
- Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
- Nanhu Brain-computer Interface Institute, Hangzhou, China
- The State key Lab of Brain-Machine Intelligence; The MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science & Brain-machine Integration, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
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15
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Luthra S. Why are listeners hindered by talker variability? Psychon Bull Rev 2024; 31:104-121. [PMID: 37580454 PMCID: PMC10864679 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02355-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 07/27/2023] [Indexed: 08/16/2023]
Abstract
Though listeners readily recognize speech from a variety of talkers, accommodating talker variability comes at a cost: Myriad studies have shown that listeners are slower to recognize a spoken word when there is talker variability compared with when talker is held constant. This review focuses on two possible theoretical mechanisms for the emergence of these processing penalties. One view is that multitalker processing costs arise through a resource-demanding talker accommodation process, wherein listeners compare sensory representations against hypothesized perceptual candidates and error signals are used to adjust the acoustic-to-phonetic mapping (an active control process known as contextual tuning). An alternative proposal is that these processing costs arise because talker changes involve salient stimulus-level discontinuities that disrupt auditory attention. Some recent data suggest that multitalker processing costs may be driven by both mechanisms operating over different time scales. Fully evaluating this claim requires a foundational understanding of both talker accommodation and auditory streaming; this article provides a primer on each literature and also reviews several studies that have observed multitalker processing costs. The review closes by underscoring a need for comprehensive theories of speech perception that better integrate auditory attention and by highlighting important considerations for future research in this area.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sahil Luthra
- Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA.
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16
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Trujillo JP, Holler J. Interactionally Embedded Gestalt Principles of Multimodal Human Communication. PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 2023; 18:1136-1159. [PMID: 36634318 PMCID: PMC10475215 DOI: 10.1177/17456916221141422] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/14/2023]
Abstract
Natural human interaction requires us to produce and process many different signals, including speech, hand and head gestures, and facial expressions. These communicative signals, which occur in a variety of temporal relations with each other (e.g., parallel or temporally misaligned), must be rapidly processed as a coherent message by the receiver. In this contribution, we introduce the notion of interactionally embedded, affordance-driven gestalt perception as a framework that can explain how this rapid processing of multimodal signals is achieved as efficiently as it is. We discuss empirical evidence showing how basic principles of gestalt perception can explain some aspects of unimodal phenomena such as verbal language processing and visual scene perception but require additional features to explain multimodal human communication. We propose a framework in which high-level gestalt predictions are continuously updated by incoming sensory input, such as unfolding speech and visual signals. We outline the constituent processes that shape high-level gestalt perception and their role in perceiving relevance and prägnanz. Finally, we provide testable predictions that arise from this multimodal interactionally embedded gestalt-perception framework. This review and framework therefore provide a theoretically motivated account of how we may understand the highly complex, multimodal behaviors inherent in natural social interaction.
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Affiliation(s)
- James P. Trujillo
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
| | - Judith Holler
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
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17
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Monson BB, Ananthanarayana RM, Trine A, Delaram V, Christopher Stecker G, Buss E. Differential benefits of unmasking extended high-frequency content of target or background speech. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2023; 154:454-462. [PMID: 37489913 PMCID: PMC10371353 DOI: 10.1121/10.0020175] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2023] [Revised: 06/14/2023] [Accepted: 06/29/2023] [Indexed: 07/26/2023]
Abstract
Current evidence supports the contribution of extended high frequencies (EHFs; >8 kHz) to speech recognition, especially for speech-in-speech scenarios. However, it is unclear whether the benefit of EHFs is due to phonetic information in the EHF band, EHF cues to access phonetic information at lower frequencies, talker segregation cues, or some other mechanism. This study investigated the mechanisms of benefit derived from a mismatch in EHF content between target and masker talkers for speech-in-speech recognition. EHF mismatches were generated using full band (FB) speech and speech low-pass filtered at 8 kHz. Four filtering combinations with independently filtered target and masker speech were used to create two EHF-matched and two EHF-mismatched conditions for one- and two-talker maskers. Performance was best with the FB target and the low-pass masker in both one- and two-talker masker conditions, but the effect was larger for the two-talker masker. No benefit of an EHF mismatch was observed for the low-pass filtered target. A word-by-word analysis indicated higher recognition odds with increasing EHF energy level in the target word. These findings suggest that the audibility of target EHFs provides target phonetic information or target segregation and selective attention cues, but that the audibility of masker EHFs does not confer any segregation benefit.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brian B Monson
- Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA
| | - Rohit M Ananthanarayana
- Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA
| | - Allison Trine
- Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA
| | - Vahid Delaram
- Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA
| | - G Christopher Stecker
- Spatial Hearing Laboratory, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska 68131, USA
| | - Emily Buss
- Department of Otolaryngology/HNS, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA
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18
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Lestang JH, Cai H, Averbeck BB, Cohen YE. Functional network properties of the auditory cortex. Hear Res 2023; 433:108768. [PMID: 37075536 PMCID: PMC10205700 DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2023.108768] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/28/2022] [Revised: 03/27/2023] [Accepted: 04/11/2023] [Indexed: 04/21/2023]
Abstract
The auditory system transforms auditory stimuli from the external environment into perceptual auditory objects. Recent studies have focused on the contribution of the auditory cortex to this transformation. Other studies have yielded important insights into the contributions of neural activity in the auditory cortex to cognition and decision-making. However, despite this important work, the relationship between auditory-cortex activity and behavior/perception has not been fully elucidated. Two of the more important gaps in our understanding are (1) the specific and differential contributions of different fields of the auditory cortex to auditory perception and behavior and (2) the way networks of auditory neurons impact and facilitate auditory information processing. Here, we focus on recent work from non-human-primate models of hearing and review work related to these gaps and put forth challenges to further our understanding of how single-unit activity and network activity in different cortical fields contribution to behavior and perception.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jean-Hugues Lestang
- Departments of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
| | - Huaizhen Cai
- Departments of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
| | - Bruno B Averbeck
- Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
| | - Yale E Cohen
- Departments of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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19
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Raghavan VS, O’Sullivan J, Bickel S, Mehta AD, Mesgarani N. Distinct neural encoding of glimpsed and masked speech in multitalker situations. PLoS Biol 2023; 21:e3002128. [PMID: 37279203 PMCID: PMC10243639 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002128] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/04/2022] [Accepted: 04/19/2023] [Indexed: 06/08/2023] Open
Abstract
Humans can easily tune in to one talker in a multitalker environment while still picking up bits of background speech; however, it remains unclear how we perceive speech that is masked and to what degree non-target speech is processed. Some models suggest that perception can be achieved through glimpses, which are spectrotemporal regions where a talker has more energy than the background. Other models, however, require the recovery of the masked regions. To clarify this issue, we directly recorded from primary and non-primary auditory cortex (AC) in neurosurgical patients as they attended to one talker in multitalker speech and trained temporal response function models to predict high-gamma neural activity from glimpsed and masked stimulus features. We found that glimpsed speech is encoded at the level of phonetic features for target and non-target talkers, with enhanced encoding of target speech in non-primary AC. In contrast, encoding of masked phonetic features was found only for the target, with a greater response latency and distinct anatomical organization compared to glimpsed phonetic features. These findings suggest separate mechanisms for encoding glimpsed and masked speech and provide neural evidence for the glimpsing model of speech perception.
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Affiliation(s)
- Vinay S Raghavan
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
- Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
| | - James O’Sullivan
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
- Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
| | - Stephan Bickel
- The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health, Manhasset, New York, United States of America
- Department of Neurosurgery, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Hempstead, New York, United States of America
- Department of Neurology, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Hempstead, New York, United States of America
| | - Ashesh D. Mehta
- The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health, Manhasset, New York, United States of America
- Department of Neurosurgery, Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Hempstead, New York, United States of America
| | - Nima Mesgarani
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
- Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America
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20
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Karunathilake IMD, Dunlap JL, Perera J, Presacco A, Decruy L, Anderson S, Kuchinsky SE, Simon JZ. Effects of aging on cortical representations of continuous speech. J Neurophysiol 2023; 129:1359-1377. [PMID: 37096924 PMCID: PMC10202479 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00356.2022] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/24/2022] [Revised: 04/04/2023] [Accepted: 04/20/2023] [Indexed: 04/26/2023] Open
Abstract
Understanding speech in a noisy environment is crucial in day-to-day interactions and yet becomes more challenging with age, even for healthy aging. Age-related changes in the neural mechanisms that enable speech-in-noise listening have been investigated previously; however, the extent to which age affects the timing and fidelity of encoding of target and interfering speech streams is not well understood. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigated how continuous speech is represented in auditory cortex in the presence of interfering speech in younger and older adults. Cortical representations were obtained from neural responses that time-locked to the speech envelopes with speech envelope reconstruction and temporal response functions (TRFs). TRFs showed three prominent peaks corresponding to auditory cortical processing stages: early (∼50 ms), middle (∼100 ms), and late (∼200 ms). Older adults showed exaggerated speech envelope representations compared with younger adults. Temporal analysis revealed both that the age-related exaggeration starts as early as ∼50 ms and that older adults needed a substantially longer integration time window to achieve their better reconstruction of the speech envelope. As expected, with increased speech masking envelope reconstruction for the attended talker decreased and all three TRF peaks were delayed, with aging contributing additionally to the reduction. Interestingly, for older adults the late peak was delayed, suggesting that this late peak may receive contributions from multiple sources. Together these results suggest that there are several mechanisms at play compensating for age-related temporal processing deficits at several stages but which are not able to fully reestablish unimpaired speech perception.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We observed age-related changes in cortical temporal processing of continuous speech that may be related to older adults' difficulty in understanding speech in noise. These changes occur in both timing and strength of the speech representations at different cortical processing stages and depend on both noise condition and selective attention. Critically, their dependence on noise condition changes dramatically among the early, middle, and late cortical processing stages, underscoring how aging differentially affects these stages.
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Affiliation(s)
- I M Dushyanthi Karunathilake
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Jason L Dunlap
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Janani Perera
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Alessandro Presacco
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Lien Decruy
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Samira Anderson
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
| | - Stefanie E Kuchinsky
- Audiology and Speech Pathology Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, United States
| | - Jonathan Z Simon
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
- Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
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21
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Bellur A, Thakkar K, Elhilali M. Explicit-memory multiresolution adaptive framework for speech and music separation. EURASIP JOURNAL ON AUDIO, SPEECH, AND MUSIC PROCESSING 2023; 2023:20. [PMID: 37181589 PMCID: PMC10169896 DOI: 10.1186/s13636-023-00286-7] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/23/2022] [Accepted: 04/21/2023] [Indexed: 05/16/2023]
Abstract
The human auditory system employs a number of principles to facilitate the selection of perceptually separated streams from a complex sound mixture. The brain leverages multi-scale redundant representations of the input and uses memory (or priors) to guide the selection of a target sound from the input mixture. Moreover, feedback mechanisms refine the memory constructs resulting in further improvement of selectivity of a particular sound object amidst dynamic backgrounds. The present study proposes a unified end-to-end computational framework that mimics these principles for sound source separation applied to both speech and music mixtures. While the problems of speech enhancement and music separation have often been tackled separately due to constraints and specificities of each signal domain, the current work posits that common principles for sound source separation are domain-agnostic. In the proposed scheme, parallel and hierarchical convolutional paths map input mixtures onto redundant but distributed higher-dimensional subspaces and utilize the concept of temporal coherence to gate the selection of embeddings belonging to a target stream abstracted in memory. These explicit memories are further refined through self-feedback from incoming observations in order to improve the system's selectivity when faced with unknown backgrounds. The model yields stable outcomes of source separation for both speech and music mixtures and demonstrates benefits of explicit memory as a powerful representation of priors that guide information selection from complex inputs.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ashwin Bellur
- Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
| | - Karan Thakkar
- Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
| | - Mounya Elhilali
- Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
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22
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Gurariy G, Randall R, Greenberg AS. Neuroimaging evidence for the direct role of auditory scene analysis in object perception. Cereb Cortex 2023; 33:6257-6272. [PMID: 36562994 PMCID: PMC10183742 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhac501] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/11/2022] [Revised: 11/29/2022] [Accepted: 11/30/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA) refers to the grouping of acoustic signals into auditory objects. Previously, we have shown that perceived musicality of auditory sequences varies with high-level organizational features. Here, we explore the neural mechanisms mediating ASA and auditory object perception. Participants performed musicality judgments on randomly generated pure-tone sequences and manipulated versions of each sequence containing low-level changes (amplitude; timbre). Low-level manipulations affected auditory object perception as evidenced by changes in musicality ratings. fMRI was used to measure neural activation to sequences rated most and least musical, and the altered versions of each sequence. Next, we generated two partially overlapping networks: (i) a music processing network (music localizer) and (ii) an ASA network (base sequences vs. ASA manipulated sequences). Using Representational Similarity Analysis, we correlated the functional profiles of each ROI to a model generated from behavioral musicality ratings as well as models corresponding to low-level feature processing and music perception. Within overlapping regions, areas near primary auditory cortex correlated with low-level ASA models, whereas right IPS was correlated with musicality ratings. Shared neural mechanisms that correlate with behavior and underlie both ASA and music perception suggests that low-level features of auditory stimuli play a role in auditory object perception.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gennadiy Gurariy
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical College of Wisconsin and Marquette University, 8701 W Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI 53233, United States
| | - Richard Randall
- School of Music and Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States
| | - Adam S Greenberg
- Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical College of Wisconsin and Marquette University, 8701 W Watertown Plank Rd, Milwaukee, WI 53233, United States
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23
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DiTullio RW, Parthiban C, Piasini E, Chaudhari P, Balasubramanian V, Cohen YE. Time as a supervisor: temporal regularity and auditory object learning. Front Comput Neurosci 2023; 17:1150300. [PMID: 37216064 PMCID: PMC10192587 DOI: 10.3389/fncom.2023.1150300] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/24/2023] [Accepted: 03/30/2023] [Indexed: 05/24/2023] Open
Abstract
Sensory systems appear to learn to transform incoming sensory information into perceptual representations, or "objects," that can inform and guide behavior with minimal explicit supervision. Here, we propose that the auditory system can achieve this goal by using time as a supervisor, i.e., by learning features of a stimulus that are temporally regular. We will show that this procedure generates a feature space sufficient to support fundamental computations of auditory perception. In detail, we consider the problem of discriminating between instances of a prototypical class of natural auditory objects, i.e., rhesus macaque vocalizations. We test discrimination in two ethologically relevant tasks: discrimination in a cluttered acoustic background and generalization to discriminate between novel exemplars. We show that an algorithm that learns these temporally regular features affords better or equivalent discrimination and generalization than conventional feature-selection algorithms, i.e., principal component analysis and independent component analysis. Our findings suggest that the slow temporal features of auditory stimuli may be sufficient for parsing auditory scenes and that the auditory brain could utilize these slowly changing temporal features.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ronald W. DiTullio
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
- Neuroscience Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
- Computational Neuroscience Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
| | - Chetan Parthiban
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
| | - Eugenio Piasini
- Computational Neuroscience Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
- Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), Trieste, Italy
| | - Pratik Chaudhari
- Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
| | - Vijay Balasubramanian
- David Rittenhouse Laboratory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
- Computational Neuroscience Initiative, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
- Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, United States
| | - Yale E. Cohen
- Departments of Otorhinolaryngology, Neuroscience, and Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States
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24
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Lui TKY, Obleser J, Wöstmann M. Slow neural oscillations explain temporal fluctuations in distractibility. Prog Neurobiol 2023; 226:102458. [PMID: 37088261 DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2023.102458] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/04/2022] [Revised: 03/06/2023] [Accepted: 04/20/2023] [Indexed: 04/25/2023]
Abstract
Human environments comprise various sources of distraction, which often occur unexpectedly in time. The proneness to distraction (i.e., distractibility) is posited to be independent of attentional sampling of targets, but its temporal dynamics and neurobiological basis are largely unknown. Brain oscillations in the theta band (3 - 8Hz) have been associated with fluctuating neural excitability, which is hypothesised here to explain rhythmic modulation of distractibility. In a pitch discrimination task (N = 30) with unexpected auditory distractors, we show that distractor-evoked neural responses in the electroencephalogram and perceptual susceptibility to distraction were co-modulated and cycled approximately 3 - 5 times per second. Pre-distractor neural phase in left inferior frontal and insular cortex regions explained fluctuating distractibility. Thus, human distractibility is not constant but fluctuates on a subsecond timescale. Furthermore, slow neural oscillations subserve the behavioural consequences of a hitherto largely unexplained but ever-increasing phenomenon in modern environments - distraction by unexpected sound.
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Affiliation(s)
- Troby Ka-Yan Lui
- Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany; Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany.
| | - Jonas Obleser
- Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany; Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany
| | - Malte Wöstmann
- Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany; Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany.
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25
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Park JJ, Baek SC, Suh MW, Choi J, Kim SJ, Lim Y. The effect of topic familiarity and volatility of auditory scene on selective auditory attention. Hear Res 2023; 433:108770. [PMID: 37104990 DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2023.108770] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/15/2022] [Revised: 04/06/2023] [Accepted: 04/15/2023] [Indexed: 04/29/2023]
Abstract
Selective auditory attention has been shown to modulate the cortical representation of speech. This effect has been well documented in acoustically more challenging environments. However, the influence of top-down factors, in particular topic familiarity, on this process remains unclear, despite evidence that semantic information can promote speech-in-noise perception. Apart from individual features forming a static listening condition, dynamic and irregular changes of auditory scenes-volatile listening environments-have been less studied. To address these gaps, we explored the influence of topic familiarity and volatile listening on the selective auditory attention process during dichotic listening using electroencephalography. When stories with unfamiliar topics were presented, participants' comprehension was severely degraded. However, their cortical activity selectively tracked the speech of the target story well. This implies that topic familiarity hardly influences the speech tracking neural index, possibly when the bottom-up information is sufficient. However, when the listening environment was volatile and the listeners had to re-engage in new speech whenever auditory scenes altered, the neural correlates of the attended speech were degraded. In particular, the cortical response to the attended speech and the spatial asymmetry of the response to the left and right attention were significantly attenuated around 100-200 ms after the speech onset. These findings suggest that volatile listening environments could adversely affect the modulation effect of selective attention, possibly by hampering proper attention due to increased perceptual load.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jonghwa Jeonglok Park
- Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Institute, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, South Korea; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea
| | - Seung-Cheol Baek
- Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Institute, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, South Korea; Research Group Neurocognition of Music and Language, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Grüneburgweg 14, Frankfurt am Main 60322, Germany
| | - Myung-Whan Suh
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul 03080, South Korea
| | - Jongsuk Choi
- Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Institute, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, South Korea; Department of AI Robotics, KIST School, Korea University of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, South Korea
| | - Sung June Kim
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea
| | - Yoonseob Lim
- Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Institute, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul 02792, South Korea; Department of HY-KIST Bio-convergence, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, South Korea.
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26
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Kazanina N, Tavano A. What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building. Nat Rev Neurosci 2023; 24:113-128. [PMID: 36460920 DOI: 10.1038/s41583-022-00659-5] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 11/02/2022] [Indexed: 12/04/2022]
Abstract
Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them. In this Perspective, we discuss two proposed functions for neural oscillations - chunking and multiscale information integration - and evaluate their merits and limitations taking into account a fundamentally hierarchical nature of syntactic representations in natural languages. We highlight insights that provide a tangible starting point for a neurocognitive model of syntactic structure building.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nina Kazanina
- University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
- Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.
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27
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Alho J, Khan S, Mamashli F, Perrachione TK, Losh A, McGuiggan NM, Graham S, Nayal Z, Joseph RM, Hämäläinen MS, Bharadwaj H, Kenet T. Atypical cortical processing of bottom-up speech binding cues in children with autism spectrum disorders. Neuroimage Clin 2023; 37:103336. [PMID: 36724734 PMCID: PMC9898310 DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103336] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/13/2022] [Revised: 01/10/2023] [Accepted: 01/20/2023] [Indexed: 01/23/2023]
Abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly display speech processing abnormalities. Binding of acoustic features of speech distributed across different frequencies into coherent speech objects is fundamental in speech perception. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the cortical processing of bottom-up acoustic cues for speech binding may be anomalous in ASD. We recorded magnetoencephalography while ASD children (ages 7-17) and typically developing peers heard sentences of sine-wave speech (SWS) and modulated SWS (MSS) where binding cues were restored through increased temporal coherence of the acoustic components and the introduction of harmonicity. The ASD group showed increased long-range feedforward functional connectivity from left auditory to parietal cortex with concurrent decreased local functional connectivity within the parietal region during MSS relative to SWS. As the parietal region has been implicated in auditory object binding, our findings support our hypothesis of atypical bottom-up speech binding in ASD. Furthermore, the long-range functional connectivity correlated with behaviorally measured auditory processing abnormalities, confirming the relevance of these atypical cortical signatures to the ASD phenotype. Lastly, the group difference in the local functional connectivity was driven by the youngest participants, suggesting that impaired speech binding in ASD might be ameliorated upon entering adolescence.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jussi Alho
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA.
| | - Sheraz Khan
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Fahimeh Mamashli
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Tyler K Perrachione
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215, USA
| | - Ainsley Losh
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Nicole M McGuiggan
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Steven Graham
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Zein Nayal
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Robert M Joseph
- Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine, 72 East Concord St, Boston, MA 02118, USA
| | - Matti S Hämäläinen
- Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA
| | - Hari Bharadwaj
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, 715 Clinic Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
| | - Tal Kenet
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA; Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 149 13th St, Boston, MA 02129, USA.
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28
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Ozmeral EJ, Menon KN. Selective auditory attention modulates cortical responses to sound location change for speech in quiet and in babble. PLoS One 2023; 18:e0268932. [PMID: 36638116 PMCID: PMC9838839 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268932] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/09/2022] [Accepted: 01/03/2023] [Indexed: 01/14/2023] Open
Abstract
Listeners use the spatial location or change in spatial location of coherent acoustic cues to aid in auditory object formation. From stimulus-evoked onset responses in normal-hearing listeners using electroencephalography (EEG), we have previously shown measurable tuning to stimuli changing location in quiet, revealing a potential window into the cortical representations of auditory scene analysis. These earlier studies used non-fluctuating, spectrally narrow stimuli, so it was still unknown whether previous observations would translate to speech stimuli, and whether responses would be preserved for stimuli in the presence of background maskers. To examine the effects that selective auditory attention and interferers have on object formation, we measured cortical responses to speech changing location in the free field with and without background babble (+6 dB SNR) during both passive and active conditions. Active conditions required listeners to respond to the onset of the speech stream when it occurred at a new location, explicitly indicating 'yes' or 'no' to whether the stimulus occurred at a block-specific location either 30 degrees to the left or right of midline. In the aggregate, results show similar evoked responses to speech stimuli changing location in quiet compared to babble background. However, the effect of the two background environments diverges somewhat when considering the magnitude and direction of the location change and where the subject was attending. In quiet, attention to the right hemifield appeared to evoke a stronger response than attention to the left hemifield when speech shifted in the rightward direction. No such difference was found in babble conditions. Therefore, consistent with challenges associated with cocktail party listening, directed spatial attention could be compromised in the presence of stimulus noise and likely leads to poorer use of spatial cues in auditory streaming.
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Affiliation(s)
- Erol J Ozmeral
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, United States of America
| | - Katherine N Menon
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States of America
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29
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Johns MA, Calloway RC, Phillips I, Karuzis VP, Dutta K, Smith E, Shamma SA, Goupell MJ, Kuchinsky SE. Performance on stochastic figure-ground perception varies with individual differences in speech-in-noise recognition and working memory capacity. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2023; 153:286. [PMID: 36732241 PMCID: PMC9851714 DOI: 10.1121/10.0016756] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/18/2022] [Revised: 12/07/2022] [Accepted: 12/10/2022] [Indexed: 06/18/2023]
Abstract
Speech recognition in noisy environments can be challenging and requires listeners to accurately segregate a target speaker from irrelevant background noise. Stochastic figure-ground (SFG) tasks in which temporally coherent inharmonic pure-tones must be identified from a background have been used to probe the non-linguistic auditory stream segregation processes important for speech-in-noise processing. However, little is known about the relationship between performance on SFG tasks and speech-in-noise tasks nor the individual differences that may modulate such relationships. In this study, 37 younger normal-hearing adults performed an SFG task with target figure chords consisting of four, six, eight, or ten temporally coherent tones amongst a background of randomly varying tones. Stimuli were designed to be spectrally and temporally flat. An increased number of temporally coherent tones resulted in higher accuracy and faster reaction times (RTs). For ten target tones, faster RTs were associated with better scores on the Quick Speech-in-Noise task. Individual differences in working memory capacity and self-reported musicianship further modulated these relationships. Overall, results demonstrate that the SFG task could serve as an assessment of auditory stream segregation accuracy and RT that is sensitive to individual differences in cognitive and auditory abilities, even among younger normal-hearing adults.
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Affiliation(s)
- Michael A Johns
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Regina C Calloway
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Ian Phillips
- Audiology and Speech Pathology Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland 20889, USA
| | - Valerie P Karuzis
- Applied Research Laboratory of Intelligence and Security, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Kelsey Dutta
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Ed Smith
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Shihab A Shamma
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Matthew J Goupell
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
| | - Stefanie E Kuchinsky
- Audiology and Speech Pathology Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland 20889, USA
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30
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Welch D, Reybrouck M, Podlipniak P. Meaning in Music Is Intentional, but in Soundscape It Is Not-A Naturalistic Approach to the Qualia of Sounds. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH 2022; 20:269. [PMID: 36612591 PMCID: PMC9819651 DOI: 10.3390/ijerph20010269] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/21/2022] [Revised: 12/14/2022] [Accepted: 12/21/2022] [Indexed: 06/17/2023]
Abstract
The sound environment and music intersect in several ways and the same holds true for the soundscape and our internal response to listening to music. Music may be part of a sound environment or take on some aspects of environmental sound, and therefore some of the soundscape response may be experienced alongside the response to the music. At a deeper level, coping with music, spoken language, and the sound environment may all have influenced our evolution, and the cognitive-emotional structures and responses evoked by all three sources of acoustic information may be, to some extent, the same. This paper distinguishes and defines the extent of our understanding about the interplay of external sound and our internal response to it in both musical and real-world environments. It takes a naturalistic approach to music/sound and music-listening/soundscapes to describe in objective terms some mechanisms of sense-making and interactions with the sounds. It starts from a definition of sound as vibrational and transferable energy that impinges on our body and our senses, with a dynamic tension between lower-level coping mechanisms and higher-level affective and cognitive functioning. In this way, we establish both commonalities and differences between musical responses and soundscapes. Future research will allow this understanding to grow and be refined further.
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Affiliation(s)
- David Welch
- Audiology Section, School of Population Health, University of Auckland, Auckland 2011, New Zealand
| | - Mark Reybrouck
- Faculty of Arts, University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
- Department of Art History, Musicology and Theater Studies, IPEM Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
| | - Piotr Podlipniak
- Institute of Musicology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, 61-712 Poznan, Poland
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31
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Francis AL. Adding noise is a confounded nuisance. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2022; 152:1375. [PMID: 36182286 DOI: 10.1121/10.0013874] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/05/2022] [Accepted: 08/15/2022] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
A wide variety of research and clinical assessments involve presenting speech stimuli in the presence of some kind of noise. Here, I selectively review two theoretical perspectives and discuss ways in which these perspectives may help researchers understand the consequences for listeners of adding noise to a speech signal. I argue that adding noise changes more about the listening task than merely making the signal more difficult to perceive. To fully understand the effects of an added noise on speech perception, we must consider not just how much the noise affects task difficulty, but also how it affects all of the systems involved in understanding speech: increasing message uncertainty, modifying attentional demand, altering affective response, and changing motivation to perform the task.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alexander L Francis
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, 715 Clinic Drive, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA
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32
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Sollini J, Poole KC, Blauth-Muszkowski D, Bizley JK. The role of temporal coherence and temporal predictability in the build-up of auditory grouping. Sci Rep 2022; 12:14493. [PMID: 36008519 PMCID: PMC9411505 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18583-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/03/2022] [Accepted: 08/16/2022] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
The cochlea decomposes sounds into separate frequency channels, from which the auditory brain must reconstruct the auditory scene. To do this the auditory system must make decisions about which frequency information should be grouped together, and which should remain distinct. Two key cues for grouping are temporal coherence, resulting from coherent changes in power across frequency, and temporal predictability, resulting from regular or predictable changes over time. To test how these cues contribute to the construction of a sound scene we present listeners with a range of precursor sounds, which act to prime the auditory system by providing information about each sounds structure, followed by a fixed masker in which participants were required to detect the presence of an embedded tone. By manipulating temporal coherence and/or temporal predictability in the precursor we assess how prior sound exposure influences subsequent auditory grouping. In Experiment 1, we measure the contribution of temporal predictability by presenting temporally regular or jittered precursors, and temporal coherence by using either narrow or broadband sounds, demonstrating that both independently contribute to masking/unmasking. In Experiment 2, we measure the relative impact of temporal coherence and temporal predictability and ask whether the influence of each in the precursor signifies an enhancement or interference of unmasking. We observed that interfering precursors produced the largest changes to thresholds.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joseph Sollini
- Hearing Sciences, Mental Health and Clinical Neurosciences, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England, UK. .,The Ear Institute, University College London, London, England, UK.
| | - Katarina C Poole
- The Ear Institute, University College London, London, England, UK
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33
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Interaction of bottom-up and top-down neural mechanisms in spatial multi-talker speech perception. Curr Biol 2022; 32:3971-3986.e4. [PMID: 35973430 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.047] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/11/2022] [Revised: 06/08/2022] [Accepted: 07/19/2022] [Indexed: 11/20/2022]
Abstract
How the human auditory cortex represents spatially separated simultaneous talkers and how talkers' locations and voices modulate the neural representations of attended and unattended speech are unclear. Here, we measured the neural responses from electrodes implanted in neurosurgical patients as they performed single-talker and multi-talker speech perception tasks. We found that spatial separation between talkers caused a preferential encoding of the contralateral speech in Heschl's gyrus (HG), planum temporale (PT), and superior temporal gyrus (STG). Location and spectrotemporal features were encoded in different aspects of the neural response. Specifically, the talker's location changed the mean response level, whereas the talker's spectrotemporal features altered the variation of response around response's baseline. These components were differentially modulated by the attended talker's voice or location, which improved the population decoding of attended speech features. Attentional modulation due to the talker's voice only appeared in the auditory areas with longer latencies, but attentional modulation due to location was present throughout. Our results show that spatial multi-talker speech perception relies upon a separable pre-attentive neural representation, which could be further tuned by top-down attention to the location and voice of the talker.
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34
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Huang Y, Hao Y, Xu J, Xu B. Compressing speaker extraction model with ultra-low precision quantization and knowledge distillation. Neural Netw 2022; 154:13-21. [PMID: 35841810 DOI: 10.1016/j.neunet.2022.06.026] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/11/2021] [Revised: 04/20/2022] [Accepted: 06/21/2022] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
Recently, our proposed speaker extraction model, WASE (learning When to Attend for Speaker Extraction) yielded superior performance over the prior state-of-the-art methods by explicitly modeling onset clue and regarding it as important guidance in speaker extraction tasks. However, it still remains challenging when it comes to the deployments on the resource-constrained devices, where the model must be tiny and fast to perform inference with minimal budget in CPU and memory while keeping the speaker extraction performance. In this work, we utilize model compression techniques to alleviate the problem and propose a lightweight speaker extraction model, TinyWASE, which aims to run on resource-constrained devices. Specifically, we mainly investigate the grouping effects of quantization-aware training and knowledge distillation techniques in the speaker extraction task and propose Distillation-aware Quantization. Experiments on WSJ0-2mix dataset show that our proposed model can achieve comparable performance as the full-precision model while reducing the model size using ultra-low bits (e.g. 3 bits), obtaining 8.97x compression ratio and 2.15 MB model size. We further show that TinyWASE can combine with other model compression techniques, such as parameter sharing, to achieve compression ratio as high as 23.81 with limited performance degradation. Our code is available at https://github.com/aispeech-lab/TinyWASE.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yating Huang
- Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China; School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
| | - Yunzhe Hao
- Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China; School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
| | - Jiaming Xu
- Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China; School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
| | - Bo Xu
- Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China; School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, CAS, Shanghai, China
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35
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Bharadwaj H, Mamashli F, Khan S, Singh R, Joseph RM, Losh A, Pawlyszyn S, McGuiggan NM, Graham S, Hämäläinen MS, Kenet T. Cortical signatures of auditory object binding in children with autism spectrum disorder are anomalous in concordance with behavior and diagnosis. PLoS Biol 2022; 20:e3001541. [PMID: 35167585 PMCID: PMC8884487 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001541] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/13/2021] [Revised: 02/28/2022] [Accepted: 01/14/2022] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Organizing sensory information into coherent perceptual objects is fundamental to everyday perception and communication. In the visual domain, indirect evidence from cortical responses suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have anomalous figure-ground segregation. While auditory processing abnormalities are common in ASD, especially in environments with multiple sound sources, to date, the question of scene segregation in ASD has not been directly investigated in audition. Using magnetoencephalography, we measured cortical responses to unattended (passively experienced) auditory stimuli while parametrically manipulating the degree of temporal coherence that facilitates auditory figure-ground segregation. Results from 21 children with ASD (aged 7-17 years) and 26 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children provide evidence that children with ASD show anomalous growth of cortical neural responses with increasing temporal coherence of the auditory figure. The documented neurophysiological abnormalities did not depend on age, and were reflected both in the response evoked by changes in temporal coherence of the auditory scene and in the associated induced gamma rhythms. Furthermore, the individual neural measures were predictive of diagnosis (83% accuracy) and also correlated with behavioral measures of ASD severity and auditory processing abnormalities. These findings offer new insight into the neural mechanisms underlying auditory perceptual deficits and sensory overload in ASD, and suggest that temporal-coherence-based auditory scene analysis and suprathreshold processing of coherent auditory objects may be atypical in ASD.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hari Bharadwaj
- Department of Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America
| | - Fahimeh Mamashli
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Sheraz Khan
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Ravinderjit Singh
- Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America
| | - Robert M. Joseph
- Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Ainsley Losh
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Stephanie Pawlyszyn
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Nicole M. McGuiggan
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Steven Graham
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Matti S. Hämäläinen
- Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States of America
| | - Tal Kenet
- Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States of America
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36
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Cai H, Dent ML. Dimensionally Specific Attention Capture in Birds Performing Auditory Streaming Task. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol 2022; 23:241-252. [PMID: 34988866 DOI: 10.1007/s10162-021-00825-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/19/2021] [Accepted: 11/17/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) have indicated that they experience attention capture in a qualitatively similar way to humans. Here, we apply a similar objective auditory streaming paradigm, using modified budgerigar vocalizations instead of ABAB-… patterned pure tones, in the sound sequences. The birds were trained to respond to deviants in the target stream while ignoring the distractors in the background stream. The background distractor could vary among five different categories and two different sequential positions, while the target deviants could randomly appear at five different sequential positions and vary among two different categories. We found that unpredictable background distractors could deteriorate birds' sensitivity to the target deviants. Compared to conditions where the background distractor appeared right before the target deviant, the attention capture effect decayed in conditions when the background distractor appeared earlier. In contrast to results from the same paradigm using pure tones, the results here are evidence for a faster recovery from attention capture using modified vocalization segments. We found that the temporally modulated background distractor captured birds' attention more and deteriorated birds' performance more than other categories of background distractor, as the temporally modulated target deviant enabled the birds to focus their attention toward the temporal modulation dimension. However, different from humans, birds have lower tolerances for suppressing the distractors from the same feature dimensions as the targets, which is evidenced by higher false alarm rates for the temporally modulated distractor than other distractors from different feature dimensions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Huaizhen Cai
- Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA
| | - Micheal L Dent
- Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA.
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Cortical Processing of Binaural Cues as Shown by EEG Responses to Random-Chord Stereograms. J Assoc Res Otolaryngol 2021; 23:75-94. [PMID: 34904205 PMCID: PMC8783002 DOI: 10.1007/s10162-021-00820-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/19/2021] [Accepted: 10/06/2021] [Indexed: 10/26/2022] Open
Abstract
Spatial hearing facilitates the perceptual organization of complex soundscapes into accurate mental representations of sound sources in the environment. Yet, the role of binaural cues in auditory scene analysis (ASA) has received relatively little attention in recent neuroscientific studies employing novel, spectro-temporally complex stimuli. This may be because a stimulation paradigm that provides binaurally derived grouping cues of sufficient spectro-temporal complexity has not yet been established for neuroscientific ASA experiments. Random-chord stereograms (RCS) are a class of auditory stimuli that exploit spectro-temporal variations in the interaural envelope correlation of noise-like sounds with interaurally coherent fine structure; they evoke salient auditory percepts that emerge only under binaural listening. Here, our aim was to assess the usability of the RCS paradigm for indexing binaural processing in the human brain. To this end, we recorded EEG responses to RCS stimuli from 12 normal-hearing subjects. The stimuli consisted of an initial 3-s noise segment with interaurally uncorrelated envelopes, followed by another 3-s segment, where envelope correlation was modulated periodically according to the RCS paradigm. Modulations were applied either across the entire stimulus bandwidth (wideband stimuli) or in temporally shifting frequency bands (ripple stimulus). Event-related potentials and inter-trial phase coherence analyses of the EEG responses showed that the introduction of the 3- or 5-Hz wideband modulations produced a prominent change-onset complex and ongoing synchronized responses to the RCS modulations. In contrast, the ripple stimulus elicited a change-onset response but no response to ongoing RCS modulation. Frequency-domain analyses revealed increased spectral power at the fundamental frequency and the first harmonic of wideband RCS modulations. RCS stimulation yields robust EEG measures of binaurally driven auditory reorganization and has potential to provide a flexible stimulation paradigm suitable for isolating binaural effects in ASA experiments.
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38
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Attentional control via synaptic gain mechanisms in auditory streaming. Brain Res 2021; 1778:147720. [PMID: 34785256 DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147720] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2021] [Revised: 09/13/2021] [Accepted: 11/05/2021] [Indexed: 11/21/2022]
Abstract
Attention is a crucial component in sound source segregation allowing auditory objects of interest to be both singled out and held in focus. Our study utilizes a fundamental paradigm for sound source segregation: a sequence of interleaved tones, A and B, of different frequencies that can be heard as a single integrated stream or segregated into two streams (auditory streaming paradigm). We focus on the irregular alternations between integrated and segregated that occur for long presentations, so-called auditory bistability. Psychaoustic experiments demonstrate how attentional control, a listener's intention to experience integrated or segregated, biases perception in favour of different perceptual interpretations. Our data show that this is achieved by prolonging the dominance times of the attended percept and, to a lesser extent, by curtailing the dominance times of the unattended percept, an effect that remains consistent across a range of values for the difference in frequency between A and B. An existing neuromechanistic model describes the neural dynamics of perceptual competition downstream of primary auditory cortex (A1). The model allows us to propose plausible neural mechanisms for attentional control, as linked to different attentional strategies, in a direct comparison with behavioural data. A mechanism based on a percept-specific input gain best accounts for the effects of attentional control.
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Allen KM, Salles A, Park S, Elhilali M, Moss CF. Effect of background clutter on neural discrimination in the bat auditory midbrain. J Neurophysiol 2021; 126:1772-1782. [PMID: 34669503 PMCID: PMC8794058 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00109.2021] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/10/2021] [Revised: 09/22/2021] [Accepted: 10/12/2021] [Indexed: 11/22/2022] Open
Abstract
The discrimination of complex sounds is a fundamental function of the auditory system. This operation must be robust in the presence of noise and acoustic clutter. Echolocating bats are auditory specialists that discriminate sonar objects in acoustically complex environments. Bats produce brief signals, interrupted by periods of silence, rendering echo snapshots of sonar objects. Sonar object discrimination requires that bats process spatially and temporally overlapping echoes to make split-second decisions. The mechanisms that enable this discrimination are not well understood, particularly in complex environments. We explored the neural underpinnings of sonar object discrimination in the presence of acoustic scattering caused by physical clutter. We performed electrophysiological recordings in the inferior colliculus of awake big brown bats, to broadcasts of prerecorded echoes from physical objects. We acquired single unit responses to echoes and discovered a subpopulation of IC neurons that encode acoustic features that can be used to discriminate between sonar objects. We further investigated the effects of environmental clutter on this population's encoding of acoustic features. We discovered that the effect of background clutter on sonar object discrimination is highly variable and depends on object properties and target-clutter spatiotemporal separation. In many conditions, clutter impaired discrimination of sonar objects. However, in some instances clutter enhanced acoustic features of echo returns, enabling higher levels of discrimination. This finding suggests that environmental clutter may augment acoustic cues used for sonar target discrimination and provides further evidence in a growing body of literature that noise is not universally detrimental to sensory encoding.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Bats are powerful animal models for investigating the encoding of auditory objects under acoustically challenging conditions. Although past work has considered the effect of acoustic clutter on sonar target detection, less is known about target discrimination in clutter. Our work shows that the neural encoding of auditory objects was affected by clutter in a distance-dependent manner. These findings advance the knowledge on auditory object detection and discrimination and noise-dependent stimulus enhancement.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kathryne M Allen
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
| | - Angeles Salles
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
| | - Sangwook Park
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
| | - Mounya Elhilali
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
| | - Cynthia F Moss
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
- Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
- Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
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40
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Rezaeizadeh M, Shamma S. Binding the Acoustic Features of an Auditory Source through Temporal Coherence. Cereb Cortex Commun 2021; 2:tgab060. [PMID: 34746791 PMCID: PMC8567849 DOI: 10.1093/texcom/tgab060] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/12/2021] [Revised: 09/29/2021] [Accepted: 09/30/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
Numerous studies have suggested that the perception of a target sound stream (or source) can only be segregated from a complex acoustic background mixture if the acoustic features underlying its perceptual attributes (e.g., pitch, location, and timbre) induce temporally modulated responses that are mutually correlated (or coherent), and that are uncorrelated (incoherent) from those of other sources in the mixture. This "temporal coherence" hypothesis asserts that attentive listening to one acoustic feature of a target enhances brain responses to that feature but would also concomitantly (1) induce mutually excitatory influences with other coherently responding neurons, thus enhancing (or binding) them all as they respond to the attended source; by contrast, (2) suppressive interactions are hypothesized to build up among neurons driven by temporally incoherent sound features, thus relatively reducing their activity. In this study, we report on EEG measurements in human subjects engaged in various sound segregation tasks that demonstrate rapid binding among the temporally coherent features of the attended source regardless of their identity (pure tone components, tone complexes, or noise), harmonic relationship, or frequency separation, thus confirming the key role temporal coherence plays in the analysis and organization of auditory scenes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mohsen Rezaeizadeh
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA
| | - Shihab Shamma
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA
- Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs, Département d’études cognitive, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL, 75005 Paris, France
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41
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Lowe MX, Mohsenzadeh Y, Lahner B, Charest I, Oliva A, Teng S. Cochlea to categories: The spatiotemporal dynamics of semantic auditory representations. Cogn Neuropsychol 2021; 38:468-489. [PMID: 35729704 PMCID: PMC10589059 DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2022.2085085] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/30/2021] [Revised: 03/31/2022] [Accepted: 05/25/2022] [Indexed: 10/17/2022]
Abstract
How does the auditory system categorize natural sounds? Here we apply multimodal neuroimaging to illustrate the progression from acoustic to semantically dominated representations. Combining magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of observers listening to naturalistic sounds, we found superior temporal responses beginning ∼55 ms post-stimulus onset, spreading to extratemporal cortices by ∼100 ms. Early regions were distinguished less by onset/peak latency than by functional properties and overall temporal response profiles. Early acoustically-dominated representations trended systematically toward category dominance over time (after ∼200 ms) and space (beyond primary cortex). Semantic category representation was spatially specific: Vocalizations were preferentially distinguished in frontotemporal voice-selective regions and the fusiform; scenes and objects were distinguished in parahippocampal and medial place areas. Our results are consistent with real-world events coded via an extended auditory processing hierarchy, in which acoustic representations rapidly enter multiple streams specialized by category, including areas typically considered visual cortex.
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Affiliation(s)
- Matthew X. Lowe
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA
- Unlimited Sciences, Colorado Springs, CO
| | - Yalda Mohsenzadeh
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA
- The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
- Department of Computer Science, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
| | - Benjamin Lahner
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA
| | - Ian Charest
- Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada
- Center for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham, UK
| | - Aude Oliva
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA
| | - Santani Teng
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA
- Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (SKERI), San Francisco, CA
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AIM: A network model of attention in auditory cortex. PLoS Comput Biol 2021; 17:e1009356. [PMID: 34449761 PMCID: PMC8462696 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009356] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/22/2020] [Revised: 09/24/2021] [Accepted: 08/18/2021] [Indexed: 11/19/2022] Open
Abstract
Attentional modulation of cortical networks is critical for the cognitive flexibility required to process complex scenes. Current theoretical frameworks for attention are based almost exclusively on studies in visual cortex, where attentional effects are typically modest and excitatory. In contrast, attentional effects in auditory cortex can be large and suppressive. A theoretical framework for explaining attentional effects in auditory cortex is lacking, preventing a broader understanding of cortical mechanisms underlying attention. Here, we present a cortical network model of attention in primary auditory cortex (A1). A key mechanism in our network is attentional inhibitory modulation (AIM) of cortical inhibitory neurons. In this mechanism, top-down inhibitory neurons disinhibit bottom-up cortical circuits, a prominent circuit motif observed in sensory cortex. Our results reveal that the same underlying mechanisms in the AIM network can explain diverse attentional effects on both spatial and frequency tuning in A1. We find that a dominant effect of disinhibition on cortical tuning is suppressive, consistent with experimental observations. Functionally, the AIM network may play a key role in solving the cocktail party problem. We demonstrate how attention can guide the AIM network to monitor an acoustic scene, select a specific target, or switch to a different target, providing flexible outputs for solving the cocktail party problem. Selective attention plays a key role in how we navigate our everyday lives. For example, at a cocktail party, we can attend to friend’s speech amidst other speakers, music, and background noise. In stark contrast, hundreds of millions of people with hearing impairment and other disorders find such environments overwhelming and debilitating. Understanding the mechanisms underlying selective attention may lead to breakthroughs in improving the quality of life for those negatively affected. Here, we propose a mechanistic network model of attention in primary auditory cortex based on attentional inhibitory modulation (AIM). In the AIM model, attention targets specific cortical inhibitory neurons, which then modulate local cortical circuits to emphasize a particular feature of sounds and suppress competing features. We show that the AIM model can account for experimental observations across different species and stimulus domains. We also demonstrate that the same mechanisms can enable listeners to flexibly switch between attending to specific targets sounds and monitoring the environment in complex acoustic scenes, such as a cocktail party. The AIM network provides a theoretical framework which can work in tandem with new experiments to help unravel cortical circuits underlying attention.
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43
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Homma NY, Bajo VM. Lemniscal Corticothalamic Feedback in Auditory Scene Analysis. Front Neurosci 2021; 15:723893. [PMID: 34489635 PMCID: PMC8417129 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2021.723893] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/11/2021] [Accepted: 07/30/2021] [Indexed: 12/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Sound information is transmitted from the ear to central auditory stations of the brain via several nuclei. In addition to these ascending pathways there exist descending projections that can influence the information processing at each of these nuclei. A major descending pathway in the auditory system is the feedback projection from layer VI of the primary auditory cortex (A1) to the ventral division of medial geniculate body (MGBv) in the thalamus. The corticothalamic axons have small glutamatergic terminals that can modulate thalamic processing and thalamocortical information transmission. Corticothalamic neurons also provide input to GABAergic neurons of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) that receives collaterals from the ascending thalamic axons. The balance of corticothalamic and TRN inputs has been shown to refine frequency tuning, firing patterns, and gating of MGBv neurons. Therefore, the thalamus is not merely a relay stage in the chain of auditory nuclei but does participate in complex aspects of sound processing that include top-down modulations. In this review, we aim (i) to examine how lemniscal corticothalamic feedback modulates responses in MGBv neurons, and (ii) to explore how the feedback contributes to auditory scene analysis, particularly on frequency and harmonic perception. Finally, we will discuss potential implications of the role of corticothalamic feedback in music and speech perception, where precise spectral and temporal processing is essential.
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Affiliation(s)
- Natsumi Y. Homma
- Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- Coleman Memorial Laboratory, Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Victoria M. Bajo
- Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
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44
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Kline AM, Aponte DA, Tsukano H, Giovannucci A, Kato HK. Inhibitory gating of coincidence-dependent sensory binding in secondary auditory cortex. Nat Commun 2021; 12:4610. [PMID: 34326331 PMCID: PMC8322099 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24758-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/03/2021] [Accepted: 07/05/2021] [Indexed: 11/09/2022] Open
Abstract
Integration of multi-frequency sounds into a unified perceptual object is critical for recognizing syllables in speech. This "feature binding" relies on the precise synchrony of each component's onset timing, but little is known regarding its neural correlates. We find that multi-frequency sounds prevalent in vocalizations, specifically harmonics, preferentially activate the mouse secondary auditory cortex (A2), whose response deteriorates with shifts in component onset timings. The temporal window for harmonics integration in A2 was broadened by inactivation of somatostatin-expressing interneurons (SOM cells), but not parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (PV cells). Importantly, A2 has functionally connected subnetworks of neurons preferentially encoding harmonic over inharmonic sounds. These subnetworks are stable across days and exist prior to experimental harmonics exposure, suggesting their formation during development. Furthermore, A2 inactivation impairs performance in a discrimination task for coincident harmonics. Together, we propose A2 as a locus for multi-frequency integration, which may form the circuit basis for vocal processing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amber M Kline
- Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.,Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
| | - Destinee A Aponte
- Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.,Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
| | - Hiroaki Tsukano
- Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.,Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
| | - Andrea Giovannucci
- Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.,Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
| | - Hiroyuki K Kato
- Department of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. .,Neuroscience Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. .,Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
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45
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Calcus A, Schoof T, Rosen S, Shinn-Cunningham B, Souza P. Switching Streams Across Ears to Evaluate Informational Masking of Speech-on-Speech. Ear Hear 2021; 41:208-216. [PMID: 31107365 PMCID: PMC6856419 DOI: 10.1097/aud.0000000000000741] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVES This study aimed to evaluate the informational component of speech-on-speech masking. Speech perception in the presence of a competing talker involves not only informational masking (IM) but also a number of masking processes involving interaction of masker and target energy in the auditory periphery. Such peripherally generated masking can be eliminated by presenting the target and masker in opposite ears (dichotically). However, this also reduces IM by providing listeners with lateralization cues that support spatial release from masking (SRM). In tonal sequences, IM can be isolated by rapidly switching the lateralization of dichotic target and masker streams across the ears, presumably producing ambiguous spatial percepts that interfere with SRM. However, it is not clear whether this technique works with speech materials. DESIGN Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured in 17 young normal-hearing adults for sentences produced by a female talker in the presence of a competing male talker under three different conditions: diotic (target and masker in both ears), dichotic, and dichotic but switching the target and masker streams across the ears. Because switching rate and signal coherence were expected to influence the amount of IM observed, these two factors varied across conditions. When switches occurred, they were either at word boundaries or periodically (every 116 msec) and either with or without a brief gap (84 msec) at every switch point. In addition, SRTs were measured in a quiet condition to rule out audibility as a limiting factor. RESULTS SRTs were poorer for the four switching dichotic conditions than for the nonswitching dichotic condition, but better than for the diotic condition. Periodic switches without gaps resulted in the worst SRTs compared to the other switch conditions, thus maximizing IM. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that periodically switching the target and masker streams across the ears (without gaps) was the most efficient in disrupting SRM. Thus, this approach can be used in experiments that seek a relatively pure measure of IM, and could be readily extended to translational research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Axelle Calcus
- UCL Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom
- Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, Département d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France
| | - Tim Schoof
- UCL Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom
| | - Stuart Rosen
- UCL Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom
| | | | - Pamela Souza
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA
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46
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Ozmeral EJ, Eddins DA, Eddins AC. Selective auditory attention modulates cortical responses to sound location change in younger and older adults. J Neurophysiol 2021; 126:803-815. [PMID: 34288759 DOI: 10.1152/jn.00609.2020] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/01/2023] Open
Abstract
The present study measured scalp potentials in response to low-frequency, narrowband noise bursts changing location in the front, azimuthal plane. At question was whether selective auditory attention has a modulatory effect on the cortical encoding of spatial change and whether older listeners with normal-hearing thresholds would show depressed cortical representation for spatial changes relative to younger listeners. Young and older normal-hearing listeners were instructed to either passively listen to the stimulus presentation or actively attend to a single location (either 30° left or right of midline) and detect when a noise stream moved to the attended location. Prominent peaks of the electroencephalographic scalp waveforms were compared across groups, locations, and attention conditions. In addition, an opponent-channel model of spatial coding was performed to capture the effect of attention on spatial-change tuning. Younger listeners showed not only larger responses overall but a greater dynamic range in their response to location changes. Results suggest that younger listeners were acquiring and encoding key spatial cues at early cortical processing areas. On the other hand, each group exhibited modulatory effects of attention to spatial-change tuning, indicating that both younger and older listeners selectively attend to space in a manner that amplifies the available signal.NEW & NOTEWORTHY In complex acoustic scenes, listeners take advantage of spatial cues to selectively attend to sounds that are deemed immediately relevant. At the neural level, selective attention amplifies electrical responses to spatial changes. We tested whether older and younger listeners have comparable modulatory effects of attention to stimuli moving in the free field. Results indicate that although older listeners do have depressed overall responses, selective attention enhances spatial-change tuning in younger and older listeners alike.
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Affiliation(s)
- Erol J Ozmeral
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
| | - David A Eddins
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
| | - Ann Clock Eddins
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
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47
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Kim Y, Yang CJ, Yoo MH, Song CI, Chung JW. Changes of Temporal Processing and Hearing in Noise after Use of a Monoaural Hearing Aid in Patients with Sensorineural Hearing Loss: A Preliminary Study. J Audiol Otol 2021; 25:146-151. [PMID: 34289535 PMCID: PMC8311061 DOI: 10.7874/jao.2021.00038] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/28/2021] [Accepted: 06/21/2021] [Indexed: 11/22/2022] Open
Abstract
Background and Objectives The relationship between hearing aid (HA) use and improvement in cognitive function is not fully known. This study aimed to determine whether HAs could recover temporal resolution or hearing in noise functions. Materials and Methods We designed a prospective study with two groups: HA users and controls. Patients older than 45 years, with a pure tone average threshold of worse than 40 dB and a speech discrimination score better than 60% in both ears were eligible. Central auditory processing tests and hearing in noise tests (HINTs) were evaluated at the beginning of the study and 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after the use of a monaural HA in the HA group compared to the control group. The changes in the evaluation parameters were statistically analyzed using the linear mixed model. Results A total of 26 participants (13 in the HA and 13 in the control group) were included in this study. The frequency (p<0.01) and duration test (p=0.02) scores showed significant improvements in the HA group after 1 year, while the HINT scores showed no significant change. Conclusions After using an HA for one year, patients performed better on temporal resolution tests. No improvement was documented with regard to hearing in noise.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yehree Kim
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
| | - Chan Joo Yang
- Department of Otolaryngology, Hanil General Hospital, Seoul, Korea
| | - Myung Hoon Yoo
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, College of Medicine, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea
| | - Chan Il Song
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
| | - Jong Woo Chung
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
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48
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Brace KM, Sussman ES. The role of attention and explicit knowledge in perceiving bistable auditory input. Psychophysiology 2021; 58:e13875. [PMID: 34110020 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13875] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/03/2020] [Revised: 04/19/2021] [Accepted: 05/14/2021] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
Abstract
The auditory system frequently encounters ambiguous sound input that can be perceived in multiple ways. The current study investigated the role of explicit knowledge in modulating how sounds are represented in auditory memory for a bistable sound sequence that could be perceived equally as integrated or segregated. We hypothesized that the dominant percept of the bistable sequence would suppress representation of the alternative perceptual organization as a function of how much top-down knowledge the listener had about the structure of the sequence. Performance measures and event-related brain potentials were compared when participants had explicit knowledge about one perceptual organization in the first half of the experiment to when they had explicit knowledge of both in the second half. We hypothesized that knowledge would modify the brain response to the alternative percept of the bistable sequence. However, that did not occur. When participants were performing one task, with no explicit knowledge of the bistable structure of the sequence, both integrated and segregated percepts were represented in auditory working memory. This demonstrates that explicit knowledge about the sounds is not a necessary factor for deriving and maintaining representations of multiple sound organizations within a complex sound environment. Passive attention operates in parallel with active or selective attention to maintain consistent representations of the environment, representations that may or may not be useful for task performance. It suggests a highly adaptive system useful in everyday listening situations where the listener has no prior knowledge about how the sound environment is structured.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kelin M Brace
- Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, USA
| | - Elyse S Sussman
- Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, USA.,Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, USA
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49
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Neuronal figure-ground responses in primate primary auditory cortex. Cell Rep 2021; 35:109242. [PMID: 34133935 PMCID: PMC8220257 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109242] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/23/2020] [Revised: 12/09/2020] [Accepted: 05/20/2021] [Indexed: 11/22/2022] Open
Abstract
Figure-ground segregation, the brain’s ability to group related features into stable perceptual entities, is crucial for auditory perception in noisy environments. The neuronal mechanisms for this process are poorly understood in the auditory system. Here, we report figure-ground modulation of multi-unit activity (MUA) in the primary and non-primary auditory cortex of rhesus macaques. Across both regions, MUA increases upon presentation of auditory figures, which consist of coherent chord sequences. We show increased activity even in the absence of any perceptual decision, suggesting that neural mechanisms for perceptual grouping are, to some extent, independent of behavioral demands. Furthermore, we demonstrate differences in figure encoding between more anterior and more posterior regions; perceptual saliency is represented in anterior cortical fields only. Our results suggest an encoding of auditory figures from the earliest cortical stages by a rate code. Neuronal figure-ground modulation in primary auditory cortex A rate code is used to signal the presence of auditory figures Anteriorly located recording sites encode perceptual saliency Figure-ground modulation is present without perceptual detection
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50
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Mi L, Tao S, Wang W, Dong Q, Dong B, Li M, Liu C. Training non-native vowel perception: In quiet or noise. THE JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 2021; 149:4607. [PMID: 34241439 DOI: 10.1121/10.0005276] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/31/2020] [Accepted: 05/25/2021] [Indexed: 06/13/2023]
Abstract
Noise makes speech perception much more challenging for non-native listeners than for native listeners. Training for non-native speech perception is usually implemented in quiet. It remains unclear if background noise may benefit or hamper non-native speech perception learning. In this study, 51 Chinese-native listeners were randomly assigned into three groups, including vowel training in quiet (TIQ), vowel training in noise (TIN), and watching videos in English as an active control. Vowel identification was assessed before (T1), right after (T2), and three months after training (T3) in quiet and various noise conditions. Results indicated that compared with the video watching group, the TIN group improved vowel identification in both quiet and noise significantly more at T2 and at T3. In contrast, the TIQ group improved significantly more in quiet and also in non-speech noise conditions at T2, but the improvement did not hold at T3. Moreover, compared to the TIQ group, the TIN group showed significantly less informational masking at both T2 and T3 and less energetic masking at T3. These results suggest that L2 speech training in background noise may improve non-native vowel perception more effectively than TIQ background only. The implications for non-native speech perception learning are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lin Mi
- State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
| | - Sha Tao
- State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
| | - Wenjing Wang
- State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
| | - Qi Dong
- State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
| | - Bing Dong
- Department of English, School of Foreign Languages, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China
| | - Mingshuang Li
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
| | - Chang Liu
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
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