title: Auditory attention--focusing the searchlight on sound.
abstract: Some fifty years after the first physiological studies of auditory attention, the field is now ripening, with exciting recent insights into the psychophysics, psychology, and neural basis of auditory attention. Current research seeks to unravel the complex interactions of pre-attentive and attentive processing of the acoustic scene, the role of auditory attention in mediating receptive-field plasticity in both auditory spatial and auditory feature processing, the contrasts and parallels between auditory and visual attention pathways and mechanisms, the interplay of bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms, the influential role of attention, goals, and expectations in shaping auditory processing, and the orchestration of diverse attentional effects at multiple levels from the cochlea to the cortex.
authors: Centre for Auditory and Acoustic Research, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. ripple@isr.umd.edu
authors: Jonathan B
authors: JB
authors: Fritz
authors: Mounya
authors: M
authors: Elhilali
authors: Stephen V
authors: SV
authors: David
authors: Shihab A
authors: SA
authors: Shamma
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001306:Auditory Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology; D013016:Sound; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*