Project Participants

摘要: BackgroundThis topic area aims to measure neuronal signals that reflect the perceptual, attentional and imaginative state of an individual brain. Specifically, we sought to develop reliable online decoding algorithms that extract from the EEG signal the sensory cortical responses corresponding to an auditory source amongst many in a complex scene, or to an imagined music and speech signal. The goal is to understand how the perception and coding of such complex signals are represented and shaped by topdown cognitive functions (such as attention and recall).The basic scientific approaches needed are highly interdisciplinary, spanning development of signalanalysis algorithms and models of cortical function, to experimental EEG recordings during performance of challenging psychoacoustic tasks. While there is considerable research that touches upon issues addressed by this project, there are nevertheless several unique aspects to this work. For example, animal neurophysiological and imaging studies of auditory cortical activity cannot easily replicate the sophisticated behavioral tasks possible with humans, especially with speech and music. And since fMRI approaches in humans lack the temporal acuity necessary to track and extract auditory sensory responses, this leaves techniques such as MEG, EEG, and ECoG as the only scientifically feasible options. However, MEG requires expensive elaborate laboratory setups, and ECoG is obviously restricted to a few groups in the world with access to patients and interested surgical teams. Consequently, EEG is an accessible alternative for studying human auditory cognition. The biggest …