Dataset Information

Attentional Selection in a Cocktail Party Environment Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial EEG.

ABSTRACT: How humans solve the cocktail party problem remains unknown. However, progress has been made recently thanks to the realization that cortical activity tracks the amplitude envelope of speech. This has led to the development of regression methods for studying the neurophysiology of continuous speech. One such method, known as stimulus-reconstruction, has been successfully utilized with cortical surface recordings and magnetoencephalography (MEG). However, the former is invasive and gives a relatively restricted view of processing along the auditory hierarchy, whereas the latter is expensive and rare. Thus it would be extremely useful for research in many populations if stimulus-reconstruction was effective using electroencephalography (EEG), a widely available and inexpensive technology. Here we show that single-trial (?60 s) unaveraged EEG data can be decoded to determine attentional selection in a naturalistic multispeaker environment. Furthermore, we show a significant correlation between our EEG-based measure of attention and performance on a high-level attention task. In addition, by attempting to decode attention at individual latencies, we identify neural processing at ?200 ms as being critical for solving the cocktail party problem. These findings open up new avenues for studying the ongoing dynamics of cognition using EEG and for developing effective and natural brain-computer interfaces.

SUBMITTER: O'Sullivan JA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4481604 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Attentional Selection in a Cocktail Party Environment Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial EEG.

O'Sullivan James A JA Power Alan J AJ Mesgarani Nima N Rajaram Siddharth S Foxe John J JJ Shinn-Cunningham Barbara G BG Slaney Malcolm M Shamma Shihab A SA Lalor Edmund C EC

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 20140115 7

How humans solve the cocktail party problem remains unknown. However, progress has been made recently thanks to the realization that cortical activity tracks the amplitude envelope of speech. This has led to the development of regression methods for studying the neurophysiology of continuous speech. One such method, known as stimulus-reconstruction, has been successfully utilized with cortical surface recordings and magnetoencephalography (MEG). However, the former is invasive and gives a relati ...[more]

PMID: 24429136

Similar Datasets

Project description:Seeing the speaker's face greatly improves our speech comprehension in noisy environments. This is due to the brain's ability to combine the auditory and the visual information around us, a process known as multisensory integration. Selective attention also strongly influences what we comprehend in scenarios with multiple speakers - an effect known as the cocktail-party phenomenon. However, the interaction between attention and multisensory integration is not fully understood, especially when it comes to natural, continuous speech. In a recent electroencephalography (EEG) study, we explored this issue and showed that multisensory integration is enhanced when an audiovisual speaker is attended compared to when that speaker is unattended. Here, we extend that work to investigate how this interaction varies depending on a person's gaze behavior, which affects the quality of the visual information they have access to. To do so, we recorded EEG from 31 healthy adults as they performed selective attention tasks in several paradigms involving two concurrently presented audiovisual speakers. We then modeled how the recorded EEG related to the audio speech (envelope) of the presented speakers. Crucially, we compared two classes of model - one that assumed underlying multisensory integration (AV) versus another that assumed two independent unisensory audio and visual processes (A+V). This comparison revealed evidence of strong attentional effects on multisensory integration when participants were looking directly at the face of an audiovisual speaker. This effect was not apparent when the speaker's face was in the peripheral vision of the participants. Overall, our findings suggest a strong influence of attention on multisensory integration when high fidelity visual (articulatory) speech information is available. More generally, this suggests that the interplay between attention and multisensory integration during natural audiovisual speech is dynamic and is adaptable based on the specific task and environment.

Dataset Information

Attentional Selection in a Cocktail Party Environment Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial EEG.

Publications

Attentional Selection in a Cocktail Party Environment Can Be Decoded from Single-Trial EEG.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets