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.

EEG-Based Intersubject Correlations Reflect Selective Attention in a Competing Speaker Scenario

“…The present study only considered task related top-down attentional processes and provided evidence that these processes have a strong influence on ISC. However, the natural environment is full of situations in which our attentional focus is captured by bottom-up, stimulus-driven events, such as salient sounds ( Kayser et al, 2005 ) or a participant’s own name ( Moray, 1959 ; Holtze et al, 2021 ). Certain scenes in a movie, such as a gun pointed at the viewer, elicit moments of high synchrony between participants ( Dmochowski et al, 2012 ).…”

“…In this study, datasets of two previously reported experiments were merged and re-analyzed ( Jaeger et al, 2020 ; Holtze et al, 2021 ), resulting in EEG recordings of forty-one German native participants ( N = 20, mean age 22.45 years ± 2.74, 15 female; N = 21, mean age 24.19 years ± 3.93, 14 female). Participants were free of psychological or neurological conditions and had normal hearing abilities.…”

“…Both studies followed a similar procedure (for further details see Jaeger et al, 2020 ; Holtze et al, 2021 ). They contained multiple 10 min blocks of stimulus presentation.…”

“…One used freefield audio presentation by positioning speakers to the front left and front right of the participants (±45°, Jaeger et al, 2020 ). The other used headphones, in particular behind-the-ear hearing aid dummies ( Holtze et al, 2021 ). In this study, stimuli were preprocessed using a head-related impulse response to spatially separate both speakers (±30°, Kayser et al, 2009 ).…”

Real-time audio processing of real-life soundscapes for EEG analysis: ERPs based on natural sound onsets

“…Obviously, the acoustic features that are provided by AFEx only provide limited information about the soundscape. The app does not provide information about many aspects that are known to be relevant for sound perception; for example, whether a sound was self-generated or generated by another sound source (e.g., Sanmiguel, Todd, & Schröger, 2013), whether the sound was relevant or irrelevant (e.g., Dehais, Roy, & Scannella, 2019;Holtze, Jaeger, Debener, Adiloglu, & Mirkovic, 2021;Scheer et al, 2018), or expected or unexpected for a person (e.g., Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012;Koreimann, Gula, & Vitouch, 2014). How to assess these factors remains a challenge.…”