On September 19, a research report by Helsinki University of Technology, Laboratory of Computational Engineering scientists will appear in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, showing that selective attention increases both gain and feature selectivity of the human auditory cortex.

The ability to select task-relevant sounds for awareness, whilst ignoring irrelevant ones, constitutes one of the most fundamental of human faculties, but the underlying neural mechanisms have remained elusive.

While most of the literature explains the neural basis of selective attention by means of an increase in neural gain, a number of papers propose enhancement in neural selectivity as an alternative or a complementary mechanism.

The results of Kauramäki and colleagues suggest that auditory selective attention in humans cannot be explained by a gain model, where only the neural activity level is increased, but rather that selective attention additionally enhances auditory cortex frequency selectivity.

The results were obtained by measuring electroencephalographic event-related potentials during task performance in healthy volunteers.

Citation: Kauramäki J, Jääskeläinen IP, Sams M (2007) Selective Attention Increases Both Gain and Feature Selectivity of the Human Auditory Cortex. PLoS ONE 2(9): e909. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000909
Please click here

PLoS ONE is the first journal of primary research from all areas of science to employ both pre- and post-publication peer review to maximize the impact of every report it publishes. PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the open access publisher whose goal is to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.

plosone Public Library of Science