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Abstract:
Localizing and identifying sounds when multiple sound sources are competing is an every day experience. This was described by Cherry (1953) as the cocktail party phenomenon. Although this effect has been extensively studied, it is still insufficiently understood how the brain is able to filter the stimulus of interest from the overall auditory information received. Our purpose was to investigate the underlying neural correlates of the cocktail party effect by functional magnetic resonance imaging, implementing a sound localization task with multiple competing sounds. Our results indicate that mainly identical areas are involved in active localization of sound sources presented in complex environments and in isolation. The auditory spatial attention network, overlaps the localization network primarily in IPL, MFG, and IFG. These latter areas correspond to the area of overlap of both dorsal and ventral attention networks described for visual processing, thus suggesting attentional processing of multisensory spatial information in these areas.
