Showing papers by "Claude Alain published in 2016"
TL;DR: Preserved phoneme specificity and upregulation of activity in speech motor regions provide a means of compensation in older adults for decoding impoverished speech representations in adverse listening conditions.
Abstract: Understanding speech in noisy environments is challenging, especially for seniors. Although evidence suggests that older adults increasingly recruit prefrontal cortices to offset reduced periphery and central auditory processing, the brain mechanisms underlying such compensation remain elusive. Here we show that relative to young adults, older adults show higher activation of frontal speech motor areas as measured by functional MRI during a syllable identification task at varying signal-to-noise ratios. This increased activity correlates with improved speech discrimination performance in older adults. Multivoxel pattern classification reveals that despite an overall phoneme dedifferentiation, older adults show greater specificity of phoneme representations in frontal articulatory regions than auditory regions. Moreover, older adults with stronger frontal activity have higher phoneme specificity in frontal and auditory regions. Thus, preserved phoneme specificity and upregulation of activity in speech motor regions provide a means of compensation in older adults for decoding impoverished speech representations in adverse listening conditions.
121 citations
TL;DR: It is proposed that music practice may have conferred an executive control advantage for musicians in later life through the underlying neural mechanisms that may support apparent beneficial effects of life-long musical practice on cognition.
58 citations
TL;DR: The interplay of attention and auditory memory is reviewed with an emphasis on attending to auditory memory in the absence of related external stimuli (i.e., reflective attention) and effects of existing memory on guiding attention.
42 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that burnout is associated with deficits in cognitive control needed to monitor and update information in working memory, and that successful task performance in burnout might require additional recruitment of anterior regions to compensate the decrement in posterior activity.
40 citations
TL;DR: Time‐frequency analysis was used to further explore the mechanism of the auditory attentional blink and found that successfully directing attention to time window where the probe would likely occur reduces the processing resources needed to suppress distractors.
Abstract: Attentional blink (AB) refers to the phenomenon whereby the correct identification of a visual or auditory target impairs processing of a subsequent probe. Although it has been shown that knowing in advance, when the probe would be presented, reduces the attentional blink and increases the amplitude of event-related potential (ERP) elicited by the probe, the neural mechanism by which attention mitigates the AB remains unclear. Here, we used time-frequency analysis to further explore the mechanism of the auditory attentional blink. Participants were presented a series of rapid auditory stimuli and asked to indicate whether a target and a probe were present in the sequence. In half of the trials, participants were cued to the probe position relative to the target ('Early' or 'Late'). Probe detection and ERP amplitude elicited by the probe decreased when the probe was presented shortly after the target compared to when it was presented later after the target. Importantly, the behavioral and ERP correlates of probe discrimination significantly improved when the 'Early' cue was presented. The improvement in processing the probe in the cued condition was accompanied by the decrease in alpha activity (8-13 Hz) after the time when the probe was expected; suggesting that successfully directing attention to time window where the probe would likely occur reduces the processing resources needed to suppress distractors. This in turn freed up available processing resources for the target and probe at the short-term consolidation stage, which ultimately reduced the auditory attentional blink.
6 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: This chapter focuses on neuroimaging studies of auditory selective attention and working memory in an effort to highlight the commonalities and differences in these two intertwined functions.
Abstract: In the past decade, there has been great interest in understanding the brain networks and mechanisms that support auditory working memory, in addition to its relationship to auditory selective attention. This chapter focuses on neuroimaging studies of auditory selective attention and working memory in an effort to highlight the commonalities and differences in these two intertwined functions. The chapter begins by introducing perceptual and reflective attention, which refer to situations in which attention is focused on external stimuli in the environment or their internal mental representations. Similarities and differences in neural networks supporting auditory selective attention and working memory are then discussed. The chapter concludes with a description of the neural networks involved in the control of attention and a discussion of future directions.
4 citations
TL;DR: The results suggest that ORN reflects the presence of multiple concurrent sounds, but not their number; the ORN results are compatible with the horse-race principle of combining different cues of concurrent sound segregation.