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It’s tough to pick a familiar face out of a crowd—but focusing on a known voice in a noisy room is easy. And a new study scanned volunteers’ brains to look at how we solve the so-called cocktail party problem. The work is in the journal Nature.
從一群人中辨認出一個熟悉的面孔確實很不容易，但在嘈雜的房間注意到一個已知的聲音卻很容易。在一項新的研究中，研究人員掃描了志愿受試者的大腦，看看如何解決所謂的“雞尾酒會問題”。這項研究刊登在《自然》雜志上。
Researchers recorded the activity of the subject’s cerebral cortexes while playing them sentences spoken by different voices. First, the subjects listened to individual sentences and reported key features of each one. Then, they heard two different sentences played at the same time, but had to listen to and recall details from only one voice.
研究人員向受試者播放不同的說話聲音，同時記錄了他們大腦皮質的活動。首先，受試者聽取了單一的句子和這些句子的主要特點。然后，在同一時間向他們播放兩個不同的句子，然后要求他們聆聽并回憶出其中一個聲音的細節。
Each voice drew a particular response from the auditory cortex. And even with an extra sentence playing simultaneously, researchers saw that the cortex responded specifically to the voice that the subject was focusing on. This finding indicates that our brains process sound based not only on the audio input they receive, but also on our listening goals. And it could lead to speech recognition systems that are accurate in crowds—even at a cocktail party.
每一個聲音都會引起聽覺皮層特定的反應。甚至當播放了額外一句話的時候，研究人員看到，受試者的聽覺皮層仍然只會對他們專注的那個聲音做出反應。這一發現表明，我們的大腦在處理聲音的時候不僅基于它們接收到的音頻輸入，還基于說話人的不同。這一研究成果有助于開發出適用于嘈雜人群甚至雞尾酒會的語音識別系統。
注：本文譯文屬可可英語原創，未經允許，請勿轉載。
