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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.
从一群人中辨认出一个熟悉的面孔确实很不容易，但在嘈杂的房间注意到一个已知的声音却很容易。在一项新的研究中，研究人员扫描了志愿受试者的大脑，看看如何解决所谓的“鸡尾酒会问题”。这项研究刊登在《自然》杂志上。
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.
研究人员向受试者播放不同的说话声音，同时记录了他们大脑皮质的活动。首先，受试者听取了单一的句子和这些句子的主要特点。然后，在同一时间向他们播放两个不同的句子，然后要求他们聆听并回忆出其中一个声音的细节。
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.
每一个声音都会引起听觉皮层特定的反应。甚至当播放了额外一句话的时候，研究人员看到，受试者的听觉皮层仍然只会对他们专注的那个声音做出反应。这一发现表明，我们的大脑在处理声音的时候不仅基于它们接收到的音频输入，还基于说话人的不同。这一研究成果有助于开发出适用于嘈杂人群甚至鸡尾酒会的语音识别系统。
注：本文译文属可可英语原创，未经允许，请勿转载。
