Redwood Neuroscience
Title " Attempts to deconstruct the “cocktail-party
effect”.”
Pierre
Divenyi
Biological
Sciences
Speech
and Hearing Research
VA
Abstract:
Arguably, life in
“cocktail-party” settings (=understanding conversations in crowd noise or
unkind acoustics) is one of the rare annoyances for which politics cannot be
blamed. Also, failure to function in these settings is, or will be (depending
on one’s youth or lack thereof), a well-recognized hindrance to potentially all
of us. As it happens, hearing loss is only partially responsible for such
failure, so one is tempted to look for the origin of the phenomenon (when it
functions) in cortical processes. Albeit indirect, tools for probing into the
“cocktail-party effect” are offered by auditory psychophysics. In this talk, I
will present some data obtained by way of a reductionist
approach – auditory scene analysis of speech-like non-speech sounds – that,
because of the definitely non-peripheral temporal range involved, implicate
central, most likely cortical, processing of dynamically changing signals.