Instrumental tones and, in some instances, simple sine-wave tones were shown to evoke stronger auditory-evoked responses in musicians compared to nonmusicians. This effect was taken as an example for plasticity in the auditory cortex elicited by training. To date, however, it is unknown whether an enlarged cortical representation for (instrumental) tones or increased neuronal activity provoked ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate central auditory processing in children with unilateral stroke and to verify whether the hemisphere affected by the lesion influenced auditory competence. METHOD 23 children (13 male) between 7 and 16 years old were evaluated through speech-in-noise tests (auditory closure); dichotic digit test and staggered spondaic word test (selective attention); pitch pattern and ...

Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity limits on their cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. Previous research has established that infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input. Yet few previous studies have directly examined infant auditory attention, and none have directly test...

Selective auditory attention is essential for human listeners to be able to communicate in multi-source environments. Selective attention is known to modulate the neural representation of the auditory scene, boosting the representation of a target sound relative to the background, but the strength of this modulation, and the mechanisms contributing to it, are not well understood. Here, listener...

Neuromagnetic fields were recorded from human subjects as they listened selectively to sequences of rapidly presented tones in one ear while ignoring tones of a different pitch in the opposite ear. Tones in the attended ear evoked larger magnetic brain responses than did unattended tones in the latency ranges 20-50 msec and 80-130 msec poststimulus. Source localization techniques in conjunction...

Auditory attention is critical for selective listening to speech from a single talker in a multi-talker environment (e.g., Cherry, 1953). Listening in such situations is notoriously more difficult and more poorly encoded to long-term memory in older than in young adults (Tun, O’Kane, & Wingfield, 2002). Recent work by Payne, Rogers, Wingfield, and Sekuler (2016) in young adults demonstrated a n...

A growing body of research suggests that cognitive functions, such as attention and memory, drive perception by tuning sensory mechanisms to relevant acoustic features. Long-term musical experience also modulates lower-level auditory function, although the mechanisms by which this occurs remain uncertain. In order to tease apart the mechanisms that drive perceptual enhancements in musicians, we...