Simultaneous Neural and Behavioral Studies of Auditory Attention

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5686-6_50, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract We present a pair of simultaneous behavioral-neurophysiological studies in human subjects, in which we manipulate subjects’ attention to different features of an auditory scene. In the first study, we embed a regular acoustic target in an irregular background; in the second study, we pair competing simultaneous regular acoustic streams. Our experimental results reveal that attention to the target, rather than to the background or unattended stream, correlates with a sustained increase in the neural target representation, as measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG), beyond auditory attention’s well-known transient effects on onset responses. The enhancement originates in core auditory cortex and covaries with both behavioral states. Furthermore, for the slower streams, where the rhythmic rate is commensurate with that of speech prosody, the target’s perceptual detectability improves over time, correlating strongly, within subjects, with the target representation’s neural buildup.