Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers
| Autor: | Alex Jiao, L. Elliot Hong, Christian Brodbeck, Jonathan Z. Simon |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Male
0301 basic medicine Time Factors Computer science Physiology Audio Signal Processing Speech recognition Sensory Physiology Social Sciences computer.software_genre Cortical processing 0302 clinical medicine Medicine and Health Sciences Attention Biology (General) Audio signal processing 0303 health sciences Brain Mapping medicine.diagnostic_test Physics General Neuroscience Process (computing) Magnetoencephalography Brain Middle Aged Sensory Systems Auditory System Physical Sciences Engineering and Technology Cocktail party Female Anatomy General Agricultural and Biological Sciences psychological phenomena and processes Research Article Adult Imaging Techniques QH301-705.5 Bioacoustics Neuroimaging Biology Research and Analysis Methods Auditory cortex Models Biological behavioral disciplines and activities General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology Young Adult 03 medical and health sciences Acoustic Signals otorhinolaryngologic diseases medicine Humans Speech Active listening 030304 developmental biology Auditory Cortex General Immunology and Microbiology Biology and Life Sciences Linguistics Acoustics 030104 developmental biology Acoustic Stimulation Speech Signal Processing Signal Processing computer Binaural recording 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Neuroscience |
| Zdroj: | PLoS Biology, Vol 18, Iss 10, p e3000883 (2020) PLoS Biology |
| ISSN: | 1545-7885 |
| Popis: | Humans are remarkably skilled at listening to one speaker out of an acoustic mixture of several speech sources. Two speakers are easily segregated, even without binaural cues, but the neural mechanisms underlying this ability are not well understood. One possibility is that early cortical processing performs a spectrotemporal decomposition of the acoustic mixture, allowing the attended speech to be reconstructed via optimally weighted recombinations that discount spectrotemporal regions where sources heavily overlap. Using human magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to a 2-talker mixture, we show evidence for an alternative possibility, in which early, active segregation occurs even for strongly spectrotemporally overlapping regions. Early (approximately 70-millisecond) responses to nonoverlapping spectrotemporal features are seen for both talkers. When competing talkers’ spectrotemporal features mask each other, the individual representations persist, but they occur with an approximately 20-millisecond delay. This suggests that the auditory cortex recovers acoustic features that are masked in the mixture, even if they occurred in the ignored speech. The existence of such noise-robust cortical representations, of features present in attended as well as ignored speech, suggests an active cortical stream segregation process, which could explain a range of behavioral effects of ignored background speech. How do humans focus on one speaker when several are talking? MEG responses to a continuous two-talker mixture suggest that, even though listeners attend only to one of the talkers, their auditory cortex tracks acoustic features from both speakers. This occurs even when those features are locally masked by the other speaker. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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