Cognitive Task Demands Modulate the Sensitivity of the Human Cochlea
Open Access
- 1 January 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Psychology
- Vol. 3, 16682
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00030
Abstract
Recent studies lead to the conclusion that focused attention, through the activity of corticofugal and medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent pathways, modulates activity at the most peripheral aspects of the auditory system within the cochlea. In two experiments, we investigated the effects of different intermodal attention manipulations on the response of outer hair cells (OHCs), and the control exerted by the MOC efferent system. The effect of the MOCs on OHC activity was characterized by measuring the amplitude and rapid adaptation time course of distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs). In the first, DPOAE recordings were compared while participants were reading a book and counting the occurrence of the letter “a” (auditory-ignoring) and while counting either short- or long-duration eliciting tones (auditory-attending). In the second, DPOAEs were recorded while subjects watched muted movies with subtitles (auditory-ignoring/visual distraction) and were compared with DPOAEs recorded while subjects counted the same tones (auditory-attending) as in Experiment 1. In both Experiments 1 and 2, the absolute level of the averaged DPOAEs recorded during the auditory-ignoring condition was statistically higher than that recorded in the auditory-attending condition. Efferent-induced rapid adaptation was evident in all DPOAE contours, under all attention conditions, suggesting that two medial efferent processes act independently to determine rapid adaptation, which is unaffected by attention, and the overall DPOAE level, which is significantly affected by changes in the focus of attention.This publication has 43 references indexed in Scilit:
- Cochlear efferent innervation and functionCurrent Opinion in Otolaryngology & Head and Neck Surgery, 2010
- Neural mechanisms of intermodal sustained selective attention with concurrently presented auditory and visual stimuliFrontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2009
- Selective Attention Increases Both Gain and Feature Selectivity of the Human Auditory CortexPLOS ONE, 2007
- Selective Attention to Visual Stimuli Reduces Cochlear Sensitivity in ChinchillasJournal of Neuroscience, 2007
- Physiological Mechanisms of Onset Adaptation and Contralateral Suppression of DPOAEs in the RatJournal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, 2005
- On the role of the olivocochlear bundle in hearing: 16 case studiesHearing Research, 1997
- The ipsilaterally evoked olivocochlear reflex causes rapid adaptation of the 2 f1−f2 distortion product otoacoustic emissionThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1996
- Attention and evoked otoacoustic emissions: attempts at characterization of intersubject variationPhysiology & Behavior, 1996
- Effective attenuation of signals in noise under focused attentionThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1991
- Frequency-Response Characteristic of Auditory Observers Detecting Signals of a Single Frequency in Noise: The Probe-Signal MethodThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1968