TY - JOUR TI - Push-pull competition between bottom-up and top-down auditory attention to natural soundscapes AU - Huang, Nicholas AU - Elhilali, Mounya A2 - Luo, Huan A2 - Shinn-Cunningham, Barbara G A2 - Grimault, Nicolas VL - 9 PY - 2020 DA - 2020/03/20 SP - e52984 C1 - eLife 2020;9:e52984 DO - 10.7554/eLife.52984 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52984 AB - In everyday social environments, demands on attentional resources dynamically shift to balance our attention to targets of interest while alerting us to important objects in our surrounds. The current study uses electroencephalography to explore how the push-pull interaction between top-down and bottom-up attention manifests itself in dynamic auditory scenes. Using natural soundscapes as distractors while subjects attend to a controlled rhythmic sound sequence, we find that salient events in background scenes significantly suppress phase-locking and gamma responses to the attended sequence, countering enhancement effects observed for attended targets. In line with a hypothesis of limited attentional resources, the modulation of neural activity by bottom-up attention is graded by degree of salience of ambient events. The study also provides insights into the interplay between endogenous and exogenous attention during natural soundscapes, with both forms of attention engaging a common fronto-parietal network at different time lags. KW - auditory KW - Attention KW - top-down KW - bottom-up KW - salience JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -