Auditory attention

The brain adjusts its internal activity to direct visual and auditory attention and regulate responses to external stimuli. Appropriate endogenous activity may support normal cognition and behaviour, while its modulation can also produce dysfunction. Beginning with mathematical models of general anaesthesia, this talk examines how changes in noisy endogenous activity can fragment functional brain organization and account for loss of consciousness. Anaesthesia experiments in ferrets support the theoretical result. Further experimental examples are discussed to show how underlying internal noise

…population activity and its impact on auditory processing within the primary auditory cortex of freely-moving gerbil

…as speech comprehension and selective attention. However, relating EEG signals to speech remains challenging, owing in part to the low SNRs of EEG signals, as well as the fact that EEG signals are highly specific to individuals. To address this, we developed a deep-learning decoder which targeted the match-mismatch problem: given two candidate speech segments and a short segment of EEG measurements, the task is to identify which of the speech

…of cognitive resources, such as auditory attention and working memory. The mechanisms that contribute to the robustness of speech comprehension are of substantial interest in the context of hearing mild to moderate hearing impairment, in which affected individuals typically report specific difficulties in understanding speech in background noise. Although hearing aids can help to mitigate this, they do not represent a univer