Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-18-2024

Journal / Book Title

Biology

Abstract

Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) indicate that noise degrades auditory neural encoding, causing decreased peak amplitude and increased peak latency. Different types of noise affect CAEP responses, with greater informational masking causing additional degradation. In noisy conditions, attention can improve target signals’ neural encoding, reflected by an increased CAEP amplitude, which may be facilitated through various inhibitory mechanisms at both pre-attentive and attentive levels. While previous research has mainly focused on inhibition effects during attentive auditory processing in noise, the impact of noise on the neural response during the pre-attentive phase remains unclear. Therefore, this preliminary study aimed to assess the auditory gating response, reflective of the sensory inhibitory stage, to repeated vowel pairs presented in background noise. CAEPs were recorded via high-density EEG in fifteen normal-hearing adults in quiet and noise conditions with low and high informational masking. The difference between the average CAEP peak amplitude evoked by each vowel in the pair was compared across conditions. Scalp maps were generated to observe general cortical inhibitory networks in each condition. Significant gating occurred in quiet, while noise conditions resulted in a significantly decreased gating response. The gating function was significantly degraded in noise with less informational masking content, coinciding with a reduced activation of inhibitory gating networks. These findings illustrate the adverse effect of noise on pre-attentive inhibition related to speech perception.

Comments

Many individuals report difficulty perceiving speech in background noise. Research has shown that one factor in this type of processing is the effect of noise on the brain’s response to speech. Different types of noise affect the strength of the neural encoding of speech to varying degrees, with greater informational masking causing greater degradation. Previous research has focused on the effects of attention in noise, which tends to enhance the neural encoding of the speech signal via inhibitory mechanisms. However, there is a pre-attentive stage of inhibition, sensory gating, which has been linked to speech perception in noise. The impact of noise on the neural response during this phase remains unclear. This preliminary study investigated the gating response, recorded via high-density EEG in fifteen normal-hearing adults, in quiet and noise conditions with low and high informational masking. Scalp maps were generated to observe brain activation in each condition. Significant gating occurred in quiet, while noise conditions resulted in a significantly decreased gating response. The gating function was significantly degraded in noise with less informational masking content, coinciding with a reduced activation of inhibitory gating networks. These findings illustrate the adverse effect of noise on pre-attentive inhibition related to speech perception.

DOI

10.3390/biology13060443

Rights

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Published Citation

Cheng, F.-Y., Campbell, J., & Liu, C. (2024). Auditory Sensory Gating: Effects of Noise. Biology, 13(6), 443. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology13060443

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