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Are They Calling My Name? Attention Capture Is Reflected in the Neural Tracking of Attended and Ignored Speech.

ABSTRACT: Difficulties in selectively attending to one among several speakers have mainly been associated with the distraction caused by ignored speech. Thus, in the current study, we investigated the neural processing of ignored speech in a two-competing-speaker paradigm. For this, we recorded the participant's brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) to track the neural representation of the attended and ignored speech envelope. To provoke distraction, we occasionally embedded the participant's first name in the ignored speech stream. Retrospective reports as well as the presence of a P3 component in response to the name indicate that participants noticed the occurrence of their name. As predicted, the neural representation of the ignored speech envelope increased after the name was presented therein, suggesting that the name had attracted the participant's attention. Interestingly, in contrast to our hypothesis, the neural tracking of the attended speech envelope also increased after the name occurrence. On this account, we conclude that the name might not have primarily distracted the participants, at most for a brief duration, but that it alerted them to focus to their actual task. These observations remained robust even when the sound intensity of the ignored speech stream, and thus the sound intensity of the name, was attenuated.

SUBMITTER: Holtze B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8019946 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:During the past decade, several studies have identified electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of selective auditory attention to speech. In these studies, typically, listeners are instructed to focus on one of two concurrent speech streams (the "target"), while ignoring the other (the "masker"). EEG signals are recorded while participants are performing this task, and subsequently analyzed to recover the attended stream. An assumption often made in these studies is that the participant's attention can remain focused on the target throughout the test. To check this assumption, and assess when a participant's attention in a concurrent speech listening task was directed toward the target, the masker, or neither, we designed a behavioral listen-then-recall task (the Long-SWoRD test). After listening to two simultaneous short stories, participants had to identify keywords from the target story, randomly interspersed among words from the masker story and words from neither story, on a computer screen. To modulate task difficulty, and hence, the likelihood of attentional switches, masker stories were originally uttered by the same talker as the target stories. The masker voice parameters were then manipulated to parametrically control the similarity of the two streams, from clearly dissimilar to almost identical. While participants listened to the stories, EEG signals were measured and subsequently, analyzed using a temporal response function (TRF) model to reconstruct the speech stimuli. Responses in the behavioral recall task were used to infer, retrospectively, when attention was directed toward the target, the masker, or neither. During the model-training phase, the results of these behavioral-data-driven inferences were used as inputs to the model in addition to the EEG signals, to determine if this additional information would improve stimulus reconstruction accuracy, relative to performance of models trained under the assumption that the listener's attention was unwaveringly focused on the target. Results from 21 participants show that information regarding the actual - as opposed to, assumed - attentional focus can be used advantageously during model training, to enhance subsequent (test phase) accuracy of auditory stimulus-reconstruction based on EEG signals. This is the case, especially, in challenging listening situations, where the participants' attention is less likely to remain focused entirely on the target talker. In situations where the two competing voices are clearly distinct and easily separated perceptually, the assumption that listeners are able to stay focused on the target is reasonable. The behavioral recall protocol introduced here provides experimenters with a means to behaviorally track fluctuations in auditory selective attention, including, in combined behavioral/neurophysiological studies.

Project description:Language comprehension relies on integrating words into progressively more complex structures, like phrases and sentences. This hierarchical structure-building is reflected in rhythmic neural activity across multiple timescales in E/MEG in healthy, awake participants. However, recent studies have shown evidence for this "cortical tracking" of higher-level linguistic structures also in a proportion of unresponsive patients. What does this tell us about these patients' residual levels of cognition and consciousness? Must the listener direct their attention toward higher level speech structures to exhibit cortical tracking, and would selective attention across levels of the hierarchy influence the expression of these rhythms? We investigated these questions in an EEG study of 72 healthy human volunteers listening to streams of monosyllabic isochronous English words that were either unrelated (scrambled condition) or composed of four-word-sequences building meaningful sentences (sentential condition). Importantly, there were no physical cues between four-word-sentences. Rather, boundaries were marked by syntactic structure and thematic role assignment. Participants were divided into three attention groups: from passive listening (passive group) to attending to individual words (word group) or sentences (sentence group). The passive and word groups were initially naïve to the sentential stimulus structure, while the sentence group was not. We found significant tracking at word- and sentence rate across all three groups, with sentence tracking linked to left middle temporal gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus. Goal-directed attention to words did not enhance word-rate-tracking, suggesting that word tracking here reflects largely automatic mechanisms, as was shown for tracking at the syllable-rate before. Importantly, goal-directed attention to sentences relative to words significantly increased sentence-rate-tracking over left inferior frontal gyrus. This attentional modulation of rhythmic EEG activity at the sentential rate highlights the role of attention in integrating individual words into complex linguistic structures. Nevertheless, given the presence of high-level cortical tracking under conditions of lower attentional effort, our findings underline the suitability of the paradigm in its clinical application in patients after brain injury. The neural dissociation between passive tracking of sentences and directed attention to sentences provides a potential means to further characterise the cognitive state of each unresponsive patient.

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Are They Calling My Name? Attention Capture Is Reflected in the Neural Tracking of Attended and Ignored Speech.

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