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Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multi-Talker Environment

View ORCID ProfileIbrahim Kiremitçi, Özgür Yilmaz, Emin Çelik, Mo Shahdloo, Alexander G. Huth, Tolga Çukur
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.412957
Ibrahim Kiremitçi
1Neuroscience Program, Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
2National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
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  • ORCID record for Ibrahim Kiremitçi
  • For correspondence: i.kiremitci@bilkent.edu.tr cukur@ee.bilkent.edu.tr
Özgür Yilmaz
2National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
3Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
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Emin Çelik
1Neuroscience Program, Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
2National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
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Mo Shahdloo
2National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
4Department of Experimental Psychology, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX3 9DU, U.K.
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Alexander G. Huth
5Department of Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
6Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
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Tolga Çukur
1Neuroscience Program, Sabuncu Brain Research Center, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
2National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM), Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
3Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR-06800, Turkey
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  • For correspondence: i.kiremitci@bilkent.edu.tr cukur@ee.bilkent.edu.tr
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ABSTRACT

Humans are remarkably adept in listening to a desired speaker in a crowded environment, while filtering out non-target speakers in the background. Attention is key to solving this difficult cocktail-party task, yet a detailed characterization of attentional effects on speech representations is lacking. It remains unclear across what levels of speech features and how much attentional modulation occurs in each brain area during the cocktail-party task. To address these questions, we recorded whole-brain BOLD responses while subjects either passively listened to single-speaker stories, or selectively attended to a male or a female speaker in temporally-overlaid stories in separate experiments. Spectral, articulatory, and semantic models of the natural stories were constructed. Intrinsic selectivity profiles were identified via voxelwise models fit to passive listening responses. Attentional modulations were then quantified based on model predictions for attended and unattended stories in the cocktail-party task. We find that attention causes broad modulations at multiple levels of speech representations while growing stronger towards later stages of processing, and that unattended speech is represented up to the semantic level in parabelt auditory cortex. These results provide insights on attentional mechanisms that underlie the ability to selectively listen to a desired speaker in noisy multi-speaker environments.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
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Posted December 07, 2020.
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Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multi-Talker Environment
Ibrahim Kiremitçi, Özgür Yilmaz, Emin Çelik, Mo Shahdloo, Alexander G. Huth, Tolga Çukur
bioRxiv 2020.12.05.412957; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.412957
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Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multi-Talker Environment
Ibrahim Kiremitçi, Özgür Yilmaz, Emin Çelik, Mo Shahdloo, Alexander G. Huth, Tolga Çukur
bioRxiv 2020.12.05.412957; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.05.412957

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