Special Issue: Active Listening

B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 2 2 0 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 1

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Foreword

Special Issue: Active Listening

The soundscape of a busy city, the jungle at the Amazon river,or a school-yard is composed of a cacophonic mixture ofhonking cars, babbling children, animal cries, andmanymanymore sound elements that hit the ear in raw, unprocessedfashion.

To make sense out of this sound mixture is no easy taskand requires active listening on all levels of the auditory systemfrom the cochlea via the brainstem structures and themidbrain to the auditory cortex and beyond.

The remarkable abilities of our auditory system have beenillustrated long ago by the cocktail party phenomenon (Cherry,1953), which pertains to the fact that we can selectively homein on one or the other speaker while attending a busy partywithout changing our position. More recently, the decipheringof our auditory environment has been conceptualized as sceneanalysis (Bregman, 1990) that entails the extraction of auditoryobjects from their background (Shinn-Cunningham, 2008). Buthow is information treated on the different levels of theauditory system, how is spatial information extracted fromthe scene, what features are used for homing in on a speechmessage on the cocktail party, and how is information fromother modalities used to aid auditory information processing?

The papers in the current special issue are about thesedifferent aspects of active listening. The papers come in partfrom a collaborative research initiative sponsored by theDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the major Germanresearch funding agency. Papers from renowned internationalauthors have been solicited as well. The collection of topicsinclude the anatomical connections of the primary auditorycortex in the gerbil as the basis of active listening (Budinger etal.), the comparison of the abilities of humans and starlings

with regard to auditory memory (Zokoll et al.) or theneurophysiological responses of gerbils and humans in anauditory target discrimination task (Ohl et al., Lenz et al.), theinteraction of visual, proprioceptive and auditory informationduring active listening (Simon-Dack and Teder-Sälejärvi,Szycik et al., Noesselt et al.), voice identification (Chartrandet al.), segmental processing of speech sounds (Zaehle et al.),and model-based analyses of the listening process (Neubauerand Heil, Dietz et al., Strahl et al., Ernst et al.).

Tackling the problem of active listening at many differentlevels, the papers illustrate the power of a multidisciplinaryapproach. We hope that you will share our enthusiasm foractive listening.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bregman, A.S., 1990. Auditory scene analysis: The PerceptualOrganization of Sound. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Cherry, E.C., 1953. Some experiments on the recognition of speech,with one and two ears. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 25, 975–979.

Shinn-Cunningham, B.G., 2008. Object-based auditory and visualattention. Trends Cogn. Sci. 12, 182–186.

Thomas F. MünteGeorg Klump

0006-8993

10.1016/j.brainres.2008.06.070

0006-8993/$ – see front matter© 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2008.06.070