RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Late cortical tracking of ignored speech facilitates neural selectivity in acoustically challenging conditions
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 238642
DO 10.1101/238642
A1 Lorenz Fiedler
A1 Malte Wöstmann
A1 Sophie K. Herbst
A1 Jonas Obleser
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/25/238642.abstract
AB Listening requires selective neural processing of the incoming sound mixture, which in humans is borne out by a surprisingly clean representation of attended-only speech in auditory cortex. How this neural selectivity is achieved even at negative signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) remains unclear. We show that, under such conditions, a late cortical representation (i.e., neural tracking) of the ignored acoustic signal is key to successful separation of attended and distracting talkers (i.e., neural selectivity). We recorded and modelled the electroencephalographic response of 18 participants who attended to one of two simultaneously presented stories, while the SNR between the two talkers varied dynamically. The neural tracking showed an increasing early-to-late attention-biased selectivity. Importantly, acoustically dominant ignored talkers were tracked neurally by late involvement of fronto-parietal regions, which contributed to enhanced neural selectivity. This neural selectivity by way of representing the ignored talker poses a mechanistic neural account of attention under real-life acoustic conditions.Research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-2014 646696 to JO) and the Oticon Foundation (NEUROCHAT).