TY - JOUR T1 - Real-time decoding of selective attention from the human auditory brainstem response to continuous speech JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/259853 SP - 259853 AU - Octave Etard AU - Mikolaj Kegler AU - Chananel Braiman AU - Antonio Elia Forte AU - Tobias Reichenbach Y1 - 2018/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/05/259853.abstract N2 - Humans are highly skilled at analysing complex auditory scenes. Previously we showed that the auditory brainstem response to speech is modulated by selective attention, a result that we achieved through developing a novel method for measuring the brainstem’s response to running speech (Forte et al. 2017). Here we demonstrate that the attentional modulation of the brainstem response to speech can be employed to decode the attentional focus of a listener in real time, from short measurements of ten seconds or less in duration. The decoding is based on complex statistical models for extracting the brainstem response from multi-channel scalp recordings and subsequent classification of the model performances according to the focus of attention. We further show how a few recording channels as well as out-of-the-box decoding that employs population average models achieve a high accuracy from short recordings as well. ER -