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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Attention Modulates the Geometry of Auditory Representations

Caterina A. Pedersini¹, Ilkka Artturi Muukkonen², Patrik Wikman³; ¹University of Helsinki, ²KU Leuven, ³University of Helsinki, University of Helsinki

Presenter: Caterina A. Pedersini

Attention plays a crucial role in shaping auditory representations, yet its impact on brain space geometry remains unclear. In this study, we investigated how attention modulates auditory object representations using fMRI (n=20). We conducted two experiments: (1) Exp OA, where participants listened to a single auditory object from one of three categories (speech, animal or instrument sounds) (2) Exp 3OA, where an auditory scene comprising three overlapping objects, each from a different category, was presented, with attention directed to one of the objects. We applied principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce data dimensionality and Procrustes analysis to align brain representations across both participants and experiments. Our results demonstrate that in 3OA auditory scenes, attention reorganizes scene geometry by shifting the entire representation toward the representational location of the attended object (as estimated from OA data). These effects were observed across nonprimary auditory regions for all object types and in a broader language network for speech. Our approach shows that key attentional effects emerge when neural data are analyzed in multidimensional brain spaces.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF