Neural Entrainment and Attentional Selection in the Listening Brain

Publication date: Available online 9 October 2019Source: Trends in Cognitive SciencesAuthor(s): Jonas Obleser, Christoph KayserThe streams of sounds we typically attend to abound in acoustic regularities. Neural entrainment is seen as an important mechanism that the listening brain exploits to attune to these regularities and to enhance the representation of attended sounds. We delineate the neurophysiology underlying this mechanism and review entrainment alongside its more pragmatic signature, often called ‘speech tracking’. The latter has become a popular analytical approach to trace the reflection of acoustic and linguistic information at different levels of granularity, from neurophysiology to neuroimaging. As we discuss, the concept of entrainment offers both a putative neurophysiological mechanism for selective listening and a versatile window onto the neural basis of hearing and speech comprehension.

Source: Trends in Cognitive Sciences - October 10, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research