Bressler Scott, Masud Salwa, Bharadwaj Hari, Shinn-Cunningham Barbara
Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, Boston University, 677 Beacon St., Boston, MA, 02421, USA.
Psychol Res. 2014;78(3):349-60. doi: 10.1007/s00426-014-0555-7. Epub 2014 Mar 16.
Selective auditory attention causes a relative enhancement of the neural representation of important information and suppression of the neural representation of distracting sound, which enables a listener to analyze and interpret information of interest. Some studies suggest that in both vision and in audition, the "unit" on which attention operates is an object: an estimate of the information coming from a particular external source out in the world. In this view, which object ends up in the attentional foreground depends on the interplay of top-down, volitional attention and stimulus-driven, involuntary attention. Here, we test the idea that auditory attention is object based by exploring whether continuity of a non-spatial feature (talker identity, a feature that helps acoustic elements bind into one perceptual object) also influences selective attention performance. In Experiment 1, we show that perceptual continuity of target talker voice helps listeners report a sequence of spoken target digits embedded in competing reversed digits spoken by different talkers. In Experiment 2, we provide evidence that this benefit of voice continuity is obligatory and automatic, as if voice continuity biases listeners by making it easier to focus on a subsequent target digit when it is perceptually linked to what was already in the attentional foreground. Our results support the idea that feature continuity enhances streaming automatically, thereby influencing the dynamic processes that allow listeners to successfully attend to objects through time in the cacophony that assails our ears in many everyday settings.
选择性听觉注意会使重要信息的神经表征相对增强，同时抑制干扰声音的神经表征，这使听众能够分析和解读感兴趣的信息。一些研究表明，在视觉和听觉中，注意力所作用的“单元”都是一个物体：即对来自外界特定外部来源的信息的一种估计。按照这种观点，最终出现在注意力 foreground 的物体取决于自上而下的、有意识的注意力与刺激驱动的、非自愿的注意力之间的相互作用。在这里，我们通过探究非空间特征（说话者身份，一种有助于将声学元素绑定为一个感知物体的特征）的连续性是否也会影响选择性注意表现，来测试听觉注意是以物体为基础的这一观点。在实验 1 中，我们表明目标说话者声音的感知连续性有助于听众报告嵌入在不同说话者说出的竞争性倒序数字中的一系列口头目标数字。在实验 2 中，我们提供证据表明这种声音连续性的益处是强制性的和自动的，就好像声音连续性通过使听众在感知上与已经处于注意力 foreground 的内容相联系时更容易关注后续目标数字，从而使听众产生偏向。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即特征连续性会自动增强流，从而影响那些在许多日常环境中充斥我们耳朵的嘈杂声中，让听众能够随着时间成功关注物体的动态过程。
