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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on July 2, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp124
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Auditory Attentional Control and Selection during Cocktail Party Listening

Kevin T. Hill1 and Lee M. Miller1,2

1 Center for Mind and Brain, University of California Davis, Davis, CA 95618, USA, 2 Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior, University of California Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

Address corresponding to Lee M. Miller, UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618, USA. Email: leemiller{at}ucdavis.edu.

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.

Key Words: attention • fMRI • pitch • space • speech


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J. R. Kerlin, A. J. Shahin, and L. M. Miller
Attentional Gain Control of Ongoing Cortical Speech Representations in a "Cocktail Party"
J. Neurosci., January 13, 2010; 30(2): 620 - 628.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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