Auditory Attentional Control and Selection during Cocktail Party Listening

• Published in: Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991) N.Y. 1991), 2010-03, Vol.20 (3), p.583-590
• Main Authors: Hill, Kevin T., Miller, Lee M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; attention; Attention - physiology; Auditory Cortex - blood supply; Auditory Cortex - physiology; Auditory Pathways - blood supply; Auditory Pathways - physiology; Auditory Perception - physiology; Cues; fMRI; Functional Laterality - physiology; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Oxygen - blood; Perceptual Masking - physiology; pitch; space; Space Perception - physiology; speech; Time Factors; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1047-3211; 1460-2199
• DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhp124

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.