When we listen to sounds like speech and music, we have to make sense of different acoustic features that vary simultaneously along multiple time scales. This means that we, as listeners, have to selectively attend to, but at the same time selectively ignore, separate but intertwined features of a stimulus.
A newly published fMRI study by Molly Henry, Björn Herrmann, and Jonas Obleser found a network of brain regions that responded oppositely to identical stimulus characteristics depending on whether they were relevant or irrelevant, even when both stimulus features involved attention to time and temporal features.
You can check out the article here:
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/08/23/cercor.bht240.full
References
- Henry MJ, Herrmann B, Obleser J. Selective Attention to Temporal Features on Nested Time Scales. Cereb Cortex. 2013 Aug 26. PMID: 23978652. [Open with Read]