Slow phase-locked modulations support selective attention to sound.

To make sense of complex soundscapes, listeners must select and attend to task-relevant streams while ignoring uninformative sounds. One possible neural mechanism underlying this process is alignment of endogenous oscillations with the temporal structure of the target sound stream. Such a mechanism has been suggested to mediate attentional modulation of neural phase-locking to the rhythms of attended sounds.

Attentional modulation of neural entrainment to sound streams in children with and without ADHD.

To extract meaningful information from complex auditory scenes like a noisy playground, rock concert, or classroom, children can direct attention to different sound streams. One means of accomplishing this might be to align neural activity with the temporal structure of a target stream, such as a specific talker or melody. However, this may be more difficult for children with ADHD, who can struggle with accurately perceiving and producing temporal intervals.

Apical length governs computational diversity of layer 5 pyramidal neurons.

Anatomical similarity across the neocortex has led to the common assumption that the circuitry is modular and performs stereotyped computations. Layer 5 pyramidal neurons (L5PNs) in particular are thought to be central to cortical computation because of their extensive arborisation and nonlinear dendritic operations. Here, we demonstrate that computations associated with dendritic Ca plateaus in mouse L5PNs vary substantially between the primary and secondary visual cortices.

Effects of auditory selective attention on neural phase: individual differences and short-term training.

How does the brain follow a sound that is mixed with others in a noisy environment? One possible strategy is to allocate attention to task-relevant time intervals. Prior work has linked auditory selective attention to alignment of neural modulations with stimulus temporal structure. However, since this prior research used relatively easy tasks and focused on analysis of main effects of attention across participants, relatively little is known about the neural foundations of individual differences in auditory selective attention.

Dimension-selective attention as a possible driver of dynamic, context-dependent re-weighting in speech processing.

The contribution of acoustic dimensions to an auditory percept is dynamically adjusted and reweighted based on prior experience about how informative these dimensions are across the long-term and short-term environment. This is especially evident in speech perception, where listeners differentially weight information across multiple acoustic dimensions, and use this information selectively to update expectations about future sounds. The dynamic and selective adjustment of how acoustic input dimensions contribute to perception has made it tempting to conceive of this as a form of non-spatial auditory selective attention.