Top-down control of selective amplification

选择性扩增的自上而下控制

• 批准号: 9023532
• 负责人: Gerald, Jr Kidd
• 金额: $ 54.2万
• 依托单位: BOSTON UNIVERSITY (CHARLES RIVER CAMPUS)
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-04-01 至 2019-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9023532
• 关键词: Accounting; Acoustics; Attention; Auditory; Awareness; Binaural; Brain; Communication; Complex; Cues; Devices; Environment; Eye; Goals; Health; Hearing; Hearing Aids; Human; Hybrids; Judgment; Lead; Masks; Modification; Monitor; Performance; Persons; Process; Public Health; Sensorineural Hearing Loss; Series; Source; Speech; Stimulus; Task Performances; Testing; Work; attentional control; base; cost; design; experience; gaze; hearing impairment; impression; improved; knowledge translation; novel; novel strategies; prototype; research study; sound; speech recognition; success

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In realistic, everyday acoustic environments human listeners - regardless of whether they have normal or impaired hearing - depend on the considerable processing power of the human brain to evaluate the "auditory scene". The various sources of sound must be parsed, evaluated for relevance and significance, and then attention must be directed to the desired source (the "target") while interfering sources (the "maskers") are discarded and ignored. Listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) - even when wearing hearing aids - often experience extreme difficulty perceptually navigating the auditory scene, severely limiting their ability to communicate effectively. From an acoustic perspective, the designation of a sound source as "target" versus "masker" is arbitrary because it depends on the current - and changeable - internal state of the observer. Although the amplification of sounds by hearing aids provides the best (often the only) option for improving communication for listeners with SNHL, current hearing aids inherently fail to solve the source selection problem because they amplify target and masker sounds indiscriminately. The challenge is to devise a hearing aid that focuses only on those sounds the listener chooses to attend and suppresses competing sounds, responding to the wishes of the listener immediately, accurately, and effectively. The goal of the work proposed here is to evaluate a new approach to providing amplification for listeners with hearing loss that is based on the premise that only the listener can make the distinction between which sources to attend and which to ignore. The experiments employ a prototype "hearing aid" that combines an eye-tracking device with an array of microphones that forms a steerable acoustic beam. By sensing where the eyes are focused, the prototype device can steer the beam of amplification toward the desired source. In that sense, it implements "top-down" control of focused amplification for the purpose of enhancing sound source selection. The primary goal is to determine the conditions under which top-down control of selective amplification, as implemented by this "visually-guided hearing aid" (VGHA), can benefit persons with SNHL in complex, dynamic and uncertain listening environments. This goal is to be accomplished under two specific aims that explore 1) hypotheses about top-down control of selective amplification in multitalker sound fields, and 2) the inherent dilemma posed by spatially selective amplification for simultaneously attending to a target source while concurrently monitoring the environment for new sources. A new approach to solving this dilemma will be examined using a dual task. The experimental plan to test these hypotheses employs listeners with hearing loss, matched listeners with normal hearing, and normal-hearing listeners under degraded stimulus conditions simulating the spatial hearing deficits caused by SNHL. Performance under VGHA conditions will be compared and contrasted to that obtained under representative control conditions, and the experimental plan is designed explicitly to take into account the type of masking - energetic versus informational - that is present.

描述（由申请人提供）：在现实的，日常的声学环境中，人类听众 - 无论听力是正常还是受损 - 取决于人脑的相当多的处理能力来评估“听觉场景”。必须解析声音的各种来源，以评估相关性和意义，然后将注意力指向所需的来源（“目标”），而干扰来源（“掩膜”）被丢弃和忽略。感官听力损失（SNHL）的听众（即使戴着助听器）也经常在听觉场景上遇到极端困难，从而严重限制了他们有效沟通的能力。从声学的角度来看，声音源称为“目标”与“蒙版”是任意的，因为它取决于观察者的当前 - 可变的 - 内部状态。尽管助听器对声音的放大为改善使用SNHL的听众的沟通的最佳选择（通常是唯一的）选择，但当前的助听器本质上无法解决源选择问题 因为它们会不加区分地放大目标和掩蔽声。挑战是设计一种助听器，该助听器仅着眼于听众选择参加和压制竞争声音的声音，并立即，准确，有效地回应听众的意愿。这里提出的工作的目的是评估一种新方法，以为听众损失的听众提供放大，这是基于这样的前提，即只有听众才能区分哪些来源参与和忽略哪些来源。该实验采用了原型“助听器”，该原型结合了一个眼球跟踪装置与形成可触发声学束的麦克风的阵列。通过感应眼睛的聚焦，原型设备可以将放大光束转向所需的源。从这个意义上讲，它实现了对集中放大的“自上而下”控制，以增强声音源选择。主要目标是确定该“视觉引导的助听器”（VGHA）实施的选择性放大的自上而下控制的条件，可以使SNHL具有复杂，动态和不确定的听力环境的人受益。该目标是在探索探索的两个特定目标下实现的。1）关于多音阶声场中选择性放大的自上而下控制的假设，以及2）2）通过空间选择性放大而构成的固有难题，以同时参与目标源，同时监测新来源的环境。将使用双重任务来检查一种解决这一难题的新方法。测试这些假设的实验计划雇用听力丧失，听力正常的听众以及在降解的刺激条件下的正常听众的听众，模拟了SNHL引起的空间听力缺陷。 VGHA条件下的性能将被比较并与在代表性控制条件下获得的性能进行比较，并且实验计划的设计明确设计为考虑到存在的掩盖类型 - 能量与信息 - 存在的类型。