The role of temporal structure in the investigation of sensory memory, auditory scene analysis, and speech perception: A healthy-aging perspective

Rimmele, Johanna Maria; Sussman, Elyse; Poeppel, David

doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.06.010

Cited by 22 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 142 publications

(201 reference statements)

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“…Although in everyday life we can reliably follow one speech stream in a noisy multi-talker environment [1], understanding the brain’s machinery underlying this feat is one of the major challenges of auditory neuroscience. This is due to the fact that solving this problem involves complex functions, such as auditory scene analysis [2], speech processing on multiple timescales [3], and selective attention [4–8]. Previous neuroimaging data showed a distributed network of brain regions subserving the above functions (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Attentional modulation of the delta- and theta-band EEG signal (below ∼7 Hz) has been suggested to reflect a general mechanism of sensory information selection, which is based on temporal expectations[35–37]. Some recent studies delivering continuous quasi-naturalistic speech stimuli to listeners provided evidence suggesting that slow oscillatory phase-entrainment mechanisms may be responsible for both the selection and suppression of speech streams in the brain[4–8]. For instance, delta-theta responses in the posterior temporal lobe are enhanced for the attended but suppressed for the unattended speaker [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attention and speech-processing related functional brain networks activated in a multi-speaker environment

et al. 2019

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Human listeners can focus on one speech stream out of several concurrent ones. The present study aimed to assess the whole-brain functional networks underlying a) the process of focusing attention on a single speech stream vs. dividing attention between two streams and 2) speech processing on different time-scales and depth. Two spoken narratives were presented simultaneously while listeners were instructed to a) track and memorize the contents of a speech stream and b) detect the presence of numerals or syntactic violations in the same (“focused attended condition”) or in the parallel stream (“divided attended condition”). Speech content tracking was found to be associated with stronger connectivity in lower frequency bands (delta band- 0,5–4 Hz), whereas the detection tasks were linked with networks operating in the faster alpha (8–10 Hz) and beta (13–30 Hz) bands. These results suggest that the oscillation frequencies of the dominant brain networks during speech processing may be related to the duration of the time window within which information is integrated. We also found that focusing attention on a single speaker compared to dividing attention between two concurrent speakers was predominantly associated with connections involving the frontal cortices in the delta (0.5–4 Hz), alpha (8–10 Hz), and beta bands (13–30 Hz), whereas dividing attention between two parallel speech streams was linked with stronger connectivity involving the parietal cortices in the delta and beta frequency bands. Overall, connections strengthened by focused attention may reflect control over information selection, whereas connections strengthened by divided attention may reflect the need for maintaining two streams in parallel and the related control processes necessary for performing the tasks.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention and speech-processing related functional brain networks activated in a multi-speaker environment

et al. 2019

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“…Rimmele et al ( 2012 ) measured MMN responses to brief two-tone sequences and found reduced MMN amplitude for older adults, indicative of reduced sensory memory with increasing age for auditory temporal order processing. This reflects a more automatic processing of the temporal structure in sensory memory (Näätänen et al, 2010 ) that does not involve explicit memory or attention related deficits at higher levels of processing (Rimmele et al, 2015 ). Indeed, reduced MMN response at rapid rates (i.e., short ISIs) is a robust feature of aging (reviewed by Cheng et al, 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Declines in Early Sensory Memory: Identification of Rapid Auditory and Visual Stimulus Sequences

Fogerty

Humes

Busey

2016

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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Age-related temporal-processing declines of rapidly presented sequences may involve contributions of sensory memory. This study investigated recall for rapidly presented auditory (vowel) and visual (letter) sequences presented at six different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) that spanned threshold SOAs for sequence identification. Younger, middle-aged, and older adults participated in all tasks. Results were investigated at both equivalent performance levels (i.e., SOA threshold) and at identical physical stimulus values (i.e., SOAs). For four-item sequences, results demonstrated best performance for the first and last items in the auditory sequences, but only the first item for visual sequences. For two-item sequences, adults identified the second vowel or letter significantly better than the first. Overall, when temporal-order performance was equated for each individual by testing at SOA thresholds, recall accuracy for each position across the age groups was highly similar. These results suggest that modality-specific processing declines of older adults primarily determine temporal-order performance for rapid sequences. However, there is some evidence for a second amodal processing decline in older adults related to early sensory memory for final items in a sequence. This selective deficit was observed particularly for longer sequence lengths and was not accounted for by temporal masking.

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“…The use of the app allows large-scale powerful studies to examine the effect of demographic variables such as age [ 24 ] and hearing loss on figure-ground analysis. The present study represents a proof of concept in which we demonstrate that behavior measured via the smartphone app is consistent with our previous psychophysics results [ 15 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-Scale Analysis of Auditory Segregation Behavior Crowdsourced via a Smartphone App

2016

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The human auditory system is adept at detecting sound sources of interest from a complex mixture of several other simultaneous sounds. The ability to selectively attend to the speech of one speaker whilst ignoring other speakers and background noise is of vital biological significance—the capacity to make sense of complex ‘auditory scenes’ is significantly impaired in aging populations as well as those with hearing loss. We investigated this problem by designing a synthetic signal, termed the ‘stochastic figure-ground’ stimulus that captures essential aspects of complex sounds in the natural environment. Previously, we showed that under controlled laboratory conditions, young listeners sampled from the university subject pool (n = 10) performed very well in detecting targets embedded in the stochastic figure-ground signal. Here, we presented a modified version of this cocktail party paradigm as a ‘game’ featured in a smartphone app (The Great Brain Experiment) and obtained data from a large population with diverse demographical patterns (n = 5148). Despite differences in paradigms and experimental settings, the observed target-detection performance by users of the app was robust and consistent with our previous results from the psychophysical study. Our results highlight the potential use of smartphone apps in capturing robust large-scale auditory behavioral data from normal healthy volunteers, which can also be extended to study auditory deficits in clinical populations with hearing impairments and central auditory disorders.

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The role of temporal structure in the investigation of sensory memory, auditory scene analysis, and speech perception: A healthy-aging perspective

Cited by 22 publications

References 142 publications

Attention and speech-processing related functional brain networks activated in a multi-speaker environment

Attention and speech-processing related functional brain networks activated in a multi-speaker environment

Age-Related Declines in Early Sensory Memory: Identification of Rapid Auditory and Visual Stimulus Sequences

Large-Scale Analysis of Auditory Segregation Behavior Crowdsourced via a Smartphone App

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