Auditory attentional control and selection during cocktail party listening

Cereb Cortex. 2010 Mar;20(3):583-90. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhp124. Epub 2009 Jul 2.

Abstract

In realistic auditory environments, people rely on both attentional control and attentional selection to extract intelligible signals from a cluttered background. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine auditory attention to natural speech under such high processing-load conditions. Participants attended to a single talker in a group of 3, identified by the target talker's pitch or spatial location. A catch-trial design allowed us to distinguish activity due to top-down control of attention versus attentional selection of bottom-up information in both the spatial and spectral (pitch) feature domains. For attentional control, we found a left-dominant fronto-parietal network with a bias toward spatial processing in dorsal precentral sulcus and superior parietal lobule, and a bias toward pitch in inferior frontal gyrus. During selection of the talker, attention modulated activity in left intraparietal sulcus when using talker location and in bilateral but right-dominant superior temporal sulcus when using talker pitch. We argue that these networks represent the sources and targets of selective attention in rich auditory environments.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation / methods
  • Attention / physiology*
  • Auditory Cortex / blood supply
  • Auditory Cortex / physiology*
  • Auditory Pathways / blood supply
  • Auditory Pathways / physiology
  • Auditory Perception / physiology*
  • Cues
  • Functional Laterality / physiology
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
  • Oxygen / blood
  • Perceptual Masking / physiology*
  • Space Perception / physiology
  • Time Factors
  • Young Adult

Substances

  • Oxygen