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Push-pull competition between bottom-up and top-down auditory attention to natural soundscapes.

ABSTRACT: In everyday social environments, demands on attentional resources dynamically shift to balance our attention to targets of interest while alerting us to important objects in our surrounds. The current study uses electroencephalography to explore how the push-pull interaction between top-down and bottom-up attention manifests itself in dynamic auditory scenes. Using natural soundscapes as distractors while subjects attend to a controlled rhythmic sound sequence, we find that salient events in background scenes significantly suppress phase-locking and gamma responses to the attended sequence, countering enhancement effects observed for attended targets. In line with a hypothesis of limited attentional resources, the modulation of neural activity by bottom-up attention is graded by degree of salience of ambient events. The study also provides insights into the interplay between endogenous and exogenous attention during natural soundscapes, with both forms of attention engaging a common fronto-parietal network at different time lags.

SUBMITTER: Huang N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7083598 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Push-pull competition between bottom-up and top-down auditory attention to natural soundscapes.

Huang Nicholas N Elhilali Mounya M

eLife 20200320

In everyday social environments, demands on attentional resources dynamically shift to balance our attention to targets of interest while alerting us to important objects in our surrounds. The current study uses electroencephalography to explore how the push-pull interaction between top-down and bottom-up attention manifests itself in dynamic auditory scenes. Using natural soundscapes as distractors while subjects attend to a controlled rhythmic sound sequence, we find that salient events in bac ...[more]

PMID: 32196457

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Project description:Polyphonic music listening well exemplifies processes typically involved in daily auditory scene analysis situations, relying on an interactive interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes. Most studies investigating scene analysis have used elementary auditory scenes, however real-world scene analysis is far more complex. In particular, music, contrary to most other natural auditory scenes, can be perceived by either integrating or, under attentive control, segregating sound streams, often carried by different instruments. One of the prominent bottom-up cues contributing to multi-instrument music perception is their timbre difference. In this work, we introduce and validate a novel paradigm designed to investigate, within naturalistic musical auditory scenes, attentive modulation as well as its interaction with bottom-up processes. Two psychophysical experiments are described, employing custom-composed two-voice polyphonic music pieces within a framework implementing a behavioral performance metric to validate listener instructions requiring either integration or segregation of scene elements. In Experiment 1, the listeners' locus of attention was switched between individual instruments or the aggregate (i.e., both instruments together), via a task requiring the detection of temporal modulations (i.e., triplets) incorporated within or across instruments. Subjects responded post-stimulus whether triplets were present in the to-be-attended instrument(s). Experiment 2 introduced the bottom-up manipulation by adding a three-level morphing of instrument timbre distance to the attentional framework. The task was designed to be used within neuroimaging paradigms; Experiment 2 was additionally validated behaviorally in the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) environment. Experiment 1 subjects (N = 29, non-musicians) completed the task at high levels of accuracy, showing no group differences between any experimental conditions. Nineteen listeners also participated in Experiment 2, showing a main effect of instrument timbre distance, even though within attention-condition timbre-distance contrasts did not demonstrate any timbre effect. Correlation of overall scores with morph-distance effects, computed by subtracting the largest from the smallest timbre distance scores, showed an influence of general task difficulty on the timbre distance effect. Comparison of laboratory and fMRI data showed scanner noise had no adverse effect on task performance. These Experimental paradigms enable to study both bottom-up and top-down contributions to auditory stream segregation and integration within psychophysical and neuroimaging experiments.

Dataset Information

Push-pull competition between bottom-up and top-down auditory attention to natural soundscapes.

Publications

Push-pull competition between bottom-up and top-down auditory attention to natural soundscapes.

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