# Behavioral outcomes and neurobiological mechanisms of sustained auditory selective attention

> **NIH NIH R01** · CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $474,188

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Human communication and other listening behaviors often take place in acoustically complex, or noisy
environments like schools, restaurants, and workplaces. Much of daily life requires us to select behaviorally-
relevant auditory dimensions, and potentially suppress irrelevant dimensions, so that the information conveyed
can be remembered and responded to appropriately. Unfortunately, this vital everyday ability is affected by
many neurological conditions resulting in marked decreases in quality of life. Despite the importance of auditory
selective attention, its cognitive and neural mechanisms are poorly understood. For example, although auditory
selective attention is widely presumed to involve both a selective enhancement of behaviorally relevant auditory
dimensions and suppression of dimensions outside this attentional focus, evidence for suppression is scant. The
long-term goal of the proposed research is to arrive at a mechanistic understanding of auditory selective
attention. The present project pursues the central hypothesis that human auditory selective attention is a result
of processes related to both enhancement (of task-relevant sounds) and suppression (of task-irrelevant sounds).
Preliminary studies establish a nonspeech experimental paradigm for engaging - and improving –auditory
selective attention directed to specific frequency bands, and for non-invasively mapping it across auditory cortex
using multimodal MRI. A parallel preliminary study establishes that attention training drives improvements in
behavioral and electrophysiological measures of auditory selective attention. Aim 1 will determine the fine-
grained `listening window' through which auditory selective attention prioritizes and selects behaviorally
relevant auditory dimensions, and potentially suppresses irrelevant dimensions. These studies also will
determine the extent to which tasks and expectations created from input regularities shape the listening window.
Aim 2 will assess changes in the spectrotemporal shape of the auditory attentional filter as listeners learn to
more efficiently deploy auditory selective attention to specific dimensions. Aim 3 will identify the
neurobiological underpinnings of auditory selective attention and their changes across improvements in
selective attention. In all, the proposed research will weave together classic psychophysical approaches,
behavioral training as a means to introduce targeted demands on selective attention, and newly-developed
human neuroimaging tools to examine human auditory selective attention along the primary axis of auditory
representation – frequency. This will build a bridge from perceptuo-cognitive assays of human auditory selective
attention to mechanistic electrophysiological and cellular/molecular studies thus far only undertaken with
invasive nonhuman animal work, thereby compounding understanding and building a natural path toward
future evidence-based approaches to the remediat...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10064026
- **Project number:** 5R01DC017734-02
- **Recipient organization:** CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** LORI L HOLT
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $474,188
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-01-01 → 2024-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10064026

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10064026, Behavioral outcomes and neurobiological mechanisms of sustained auditory selective attention (5R01DC017734-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10064026. Licensed CC0.

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