{"id":1193,"date":"2010-10-15T15:26:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T19:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2017-07-31T15:28:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T19:28:37","slug":"attention-grabbing-finding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2010\/10\/attention-grabbing-finding\/","title":{"rendered":"An Attention-Grabbing Finding"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Elhilali\"<\/a>Most people have had the experience of walking into a noisy room full of people and at first being aware only of an indecipherable babble. But we quickly are able to tune into certain sounds in the environment\u2014the music, or a particular conversation, for instance\u2014and block out the others. While this ability seems natural, it\u2019s not entirely clear how we manage it. And so far, we don\u2019t know how to build machines that do it very well either. Mounya Elhilali, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a researcher at the Center for Language and Speech Processing, is working to untangle just how the brain manages this complex task. Her work could lead to better telephone voice automation systems, improved hearing aids\u2014even smarter eavesdropping devices.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research tries to understand how the brain solves this problem, and how we can translate that into machines that interact with the environment, no matter how complex the environment is,\u201d Elhilali says.<\/p>\n

In an article in PLOS Biology, Elhilali and colleagues looked at how the brain switches between different auditory signals, and discovered that the process is a combination of conscious and unconscious processes.<\/p>\n

In the experiment, volunteers were asked to listen to an auditory \u201cscene,\u201d which consisted of a beep that repeated four times a second, against a background of random sounds. The volunteers\u2019 neural signals were simultaneously measured with a magnetoencephalograph (MEG), which detects magnetic fields created by electric currents in the brain.<\/p>\n

The MEG showed a signal pulsing at four times a second, coming from a brain structure called the auditory cortex. The device was detecting the activity of neurons, which were dedicated to representing the target sound. Then the researchers asked subjects to pay attention either to the regular pulse, or to the background sound. When the volunteers focused on the regular pulse, the measured magnetic field became up to four times stronger\u2014indicating that more of the brain was being dedicated to the task of representing the sound.<\/p>\n

The researchers also could see the brain signal increase when they made the signal louder\u2014but never as much as it increased when the subjects were simply asked to pay attention to it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur study shows that when we focus our attention to one sound among a number of competing background sounds, our brain boosts the representation of this target sound relative to all other sounds,\u201d says Elhilali. \u201cThe brain responds more vigorously to this object of attention and also causes different populations of neurons to all respond at the same time to the target sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elhilali says the results give researchers some insight into how the brain untangles sounds. Specifically, it shows how a \u201ctop down\u201d brain process, like attention, interacts with a \u201cbottom up\u201d process like salience, in which a loud or sudden noise automatically grabs our attention.<\/p>\n

Such insights, in addition to shaping better technology, could eventually help doctors more clearly understand why the ability to make sense of our environment aurally goes awry due to cognitive impairment and aging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RESEARCH: The “cocktail party effect” is the subject of a new 5-year NSF-funded research effort led by Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Mounya Elhilali.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-ideas","issue-fall-2010"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Attention-Grabbing Finding - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2010\/10\/attention-grabbing-finding\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Attention-Grabbing Finding - 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