RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 The human auditory brainstem response to running speech reveals a subcortical mechanism for selective attention
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 167718
DO 10.1101/167718
A1 Antonio Elia Forte
A1 Octave Etard
A1 Tobias Reichenbach
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/25/167718.abstract
AB Humans excel at selectively listening to a target speaker in background noise such as competing voices. While the encoding of speech in the auditory cortex is modulated by selective attention, it remains debated whether such modulation occurs already in subcortical auditory structures. Investigating the contribution of the human brainstem to attention has, in particular, been hindered by the tiny amplitude of the brainstem response. Its measurement normally requires a large number of repetitions of the same short sound stimuli, which may lead to a loss of attention and to neural adaptation. Here we develop a mathematical method to measure the auditory brainstem response to running speech, an acoustic stimulus that does not repeat and that has a high ecological validity. We employ this method to assess the brainstem’s activity when a subject listens to one of two competing speakers, and show that the brainstem response is consistently modulated by attention.