Adaptive neural states and traits at the cocktail party

Challenging listening situations do pose multiple challenges to our behavioural goal of communicating successfully. What’s more, for us as neuroscientists, there is a lot to learn from these situations: How do neural brain states affect the percepts evoked by ambiguous or noisy sensory input? What are possible neural implementations of spatial and temporal filters for solving the ‘cocktail party problem’? With some tentative answers to these questions from M/EEG as well as fMRI at hand, my laboratory is currently exploring (i) the degree to which aging individuals differ in these neural states and traits, and (ii) whether this can explain some of the variation in listening success at the cocktail party.