Brain responses in humans demonstrate that the analysis of crowded acoustic scenes is based on a mechanism that infers the predictability of sensory information and up-regulates processing for reliable signals.
Faced with multiple sources of sound, humans can better perceive all of a target sound's features when one of those features changes in time with a visual stimulus.
Experiments with realistic acoustic stimuli have revealed that humans distinguish salient sounds from background noise by integrating frequency and temporal information.
A non-invasive cognitive assistant for blind people endows objects in the environment with voices, allowing users to explore the scene, localize objects, and navigate through a building with minimal training.
Everyday soundscapes dynamically engage attention towards target sounds or salient ambient events, with both attentional forms engaging the same fronto-parietal network but in a push-pull competition for limited neural resources.
Cocktail-party listening performance in normal-hearing listeners is associated with the ability to focus attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors.