Human auditory attention: a central or peripheral process?
The click-evoked electrical responses of the human cochlear nerve were recorded from the external ear canal concurrently with the cortical evoked potentials from the scalp. Paying attention to the clicks during a discrimination task resulted in a highly significant enhancement of the cortical response but no change in the cochlear nerve response. Hence no evidence was obtained for the operation of a peripheral gating mechanism during attention in man.
D000200:Action Potentials; D001288:Attention; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D003056:Cochlear Nerve / Q000502:physiology; D004566:Electrodes; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D006309:Hearing; D006801:Humans; D009847:Olivary Nucleus / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D013016:Sound