Auditory attention powerfully influences perception and modulates sound processing in auditory cortex, but the extent of attentional modulation in the subcortical auditory pathway remains poorly understood. We examined the effects of intermodal attention using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the inferior colliculus and auditory cortex in a demanding intermodal selective attention task ...

While strong activation of auditory cortex is generally found for exogenous orienting of attention, endogenous, intra-modal shifting of auditory attention has not yet been demonstrated to evoke transient activation of the auditory cortex. Here, we used fMRI to test if endogenous shifting of attention is also associated with transient activation of the auditory cortex. In contrast to previous st...

Attention improves auditory performance in noisy environments by either enhancing the processing of task-relevant stimuli ("gain"), suppressing task-irrelevant information ("sharpening"), or both. In the present study, we investigated the effect of focused auditory attention on the population-level frequency tuning in human auditory cortex by means of magnetoencephalography. Using complex stimu...

We used the stimulus-driven 40-Hz auditory steady-state response (ASSR) that localizes tonotopically to the region of primary auditory cortex (A1) to study modulation of this region by top-down attention. Experiment 1 presented amplitude modulated (AM) auditory and visual stimuli simultaneously (AM at 40 Hz and 16 Hz, respectively) while participants responded to targets in one modality or the ...