Neural dynamics of auditory attention: Interactions between top-down and bottom-up processes.

Abstract

Auditory attention allows listeners to navigate complex acoustic environments by prioritizing behaviorally-relevant sounds while limiting interference from competing input. This process is guided by a dynamic interplay between top-down attention, driven by behavioral goals and expectations, and bottom-up attention, triggered by stimulus-driven salience. Although this distinction remains useful at a conceptual level, growing evidence suggests that auditory attention emerges from continuous interactions between goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes that recruit partially overlapping neural systems and vary with task demands, stimulus properties, and prior experience. This review focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying attentional control and interactions between top-down and bottom-up auditory attention. It synthesizesevidence from neurophysiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging studies and explores how top-down control modulates the neural processing and attentional impact of salient input, how bottom-up signals override attentional focus, and how these interactions are shaped by task demands and individual cognitive capacity. The findings synthesized here support a view of auditory attention as a flexible and adaptive system, whose operation emerges from context-dependent interactions, with important implications for models of attention and real-world listening behaviors.