Dr. Claude Alain
Research Focus
My research is in the field of cognitive neuroscience and focuses on the brain processes that mediate perception and cognition of auditory patterns and events, specifically short-term memory and selective attention. I use a combination of neuroimaging techniques (e.g., ERPs, MEG, and fMRI) to investigate which, and how, different brain areas work together when participants' attention is directed to a particular sound identity and/or sound location in the auditory field. The hypothesis is that the auditory system provides the listener with the identity of the event as well as its location, i.e. the what and the where, and that these two types of information are provided by different areas of the brain. I am also interested in the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie auditory scene analysis and how these mechanisms are influenced by the aging process. We are currently conducting several experiments that focus on the neural correlates of auditory scene analysis using either EEG, MEG and/or fMRI. These include investigating age-related differences in auditory cortical activity underlying concurrent sound perception, age-related differences in identifying and localizing auditory objects, and the effect of musical expertise on auditory scene analysis.Keywords: auditory cognitive neuroscience, psychophysiological and neural mechanisms of audition perception, attention, and cognition. perceptual learning, rehabilitation, memory, human brain eletrophysiology, functional neuroimaging and magnetoencephalography.
Select Publications
- Alain C, Arnott SR, Hevenor S, Graham S, Grady CL. (2001). "What" and "where" in the human auditory system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98 (21), 12301-12306.
- Arnott SR, Binns MA, Grady CL, Alain C. (2004). Assessing the auditory dual-pathway model in humans. Neuroimage, 22, 401-408.
- West R, Alain C. (2000). Age-related decline in inhibitory control contributes to the increased Stroop effect observed in older adults. Psychophysiology, 37 (2), 179-189.
- Bidelman GM, Alain C. (2015). Musical Training Orchestrates Coordinated Neuroplasticity in Auditory Brainstem and Cortex to Counteract Age-Related Declines in Categorical Vowel Perception. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35(3), 1240-1249.
Curriculum Vitae
