ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: NEURAL AND COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO AUDITORY SCENE ANALYSIS

Our perception of the world is highly dependent on the complex processing of the sensory inputs by the brain. Hearing is one of those seemingly effortless sensory tasks that enables us to perceive the auditory world and integrate acoustic information from the environment into cognitive experiences. The main purpose of studying auditory system is to shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying our hearing ability. Understanding the systematic approach of the brain in performing such complicated tasks is an ultimate goal with numerous clinical and intellectual applications. In this thesis, we take advantage of various experimental and computational approaches to understand the functionality of the brain in analyzing complex audi-tory scenes. We first focus on investigating the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying auditory sound segregation, also known as auditory streaming. Em-ploying an informational masking paradigm, we explore the interaction between stimulus-driven and task-driven attentional process in the auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings from the human brain. The result