Neurophysiological mechanisms of auditory selective attention in humans

This chapter reviews the main data on the physiological substrates of audit ory selective attention and their contribution to theoretical models of cog nitive psychology. While event-related potentials, magnetoencephalography, and more recently neuroimaging techniques have provided fundamental informa tion on the neural correlates of attention in the central cortical system, measurements of the frequency-following responses in the brainstem and evok ed otoacoustic emissions at the cochlea strongly suggest attentional phenom ena at the auditory periphery. We propose an adaptive filtering mechanism f or selective auditory attention that can be flexibly and dynamically tuned depending on the attentional demand.