Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, MA 02114;Program in Speech Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health, Sciences, and Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; and
Eaton-Peabody Laboratories, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, MA 02114;Department of Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24;111(25):E2606-15. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1322184111. Epub 2014 Jun 9.
All sensory systems face the fundamental challenge of encoding weak signals in noisy backgrounds. Although discrimination abilities can improve with practice, these benefits rarely generalize to untrained stimulus dimensions. Inspired by recent findings that action video game training can impart a broader spectrum of benefits than traditional perceptual learning paradigms, we trained adult humans and mice in an immersive audio game that challenged them to forage for hidden auditory targets in a 2D soundscape. Both species learned to modulate their angular search vectors and target approach velocities based on real-time changes in the level of a weak tone embedded in broadband noise. In humans, mastery of this tone in noise task generalized to an improved ability to comprehend spoken sentences in speech babble noise. Neural plasticity in the auditory cortex of trained mice supported improved decoding of low-intensity sounds at the training frequency and an enhanced resistance to interference from background masking noise. These findings highlight the potential to improve the neural and perceptual salience of degraded sensory stimuli through immersive computerized games.
所有感觉系统都面临着在噪声背景下编码弱信号的基本挑战。尽管辨别能力可以通过练习提高，但这些益处很少能推广到未经训练的刺激维度。受最近发现的启发，即动作视频游戏训练可以带来比传统感知学习范式更广泛的益处，我们在沉浸式音频游戏中对成年人和老鼠进行训练，该游戏要求他们在二维声景中寻找隐藏的听觉目标。两种物种都学会了根据嵌入在宽带噪声中的弱音的实时变化来调整其角度搜索向量和目标接近速度。在人类中，对这种噪声中音调任务的掌握可以概括为提高在语音杂音中理解口语句子的能力。经过训练的老鼠的听觉皮层的神经可塑性支持在训练频率下对低强度声音的解码能力提高，并增强了对背景掩蔽噪声干扰的抵抗力。这些发现强调了通过沉浸式计算机游戏提高退化感觉刺激的神经和感知显著性的潜力。
