Breaking down the cocktail party: Attentional modulation of cerebral audiovisual speech processing

Wikman, Patrik; Sahari, Elisa; Salmela, Viljami; Leminen, Alina; Leminen, Miika; Laine, Matti; Alho, Kimmo

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117365

Cited by 15 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…Although cholinergic mechanisms are clearly important in attentional states, such mechanisms are thought to operate on slow timescales and can be long lasting [42], whereas switching between exploration and focused attention requires rapid, reversible changes in cortical outputs, potentially on sub-second timescales. Recent studies with EEG and fMRI in humans have suggested top-down activation in the frontal areas modulates processing in auditory cortex on the time scale of hundreds of milliseconds [43,44]. Evidence from mice studies also support the idea that the frontoparietal network can modulate processing in the primary sensory cortices during selective attention [5,[45][46][47].…”

Section: Alternative/additional Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 85%

AIM: A network model of attention in auditory cortex

Chou

Sen

2021

PLoS Comput Biol

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Attentional modulation of cortical networks is critical for the cognitive flexibility required to process complex scenes. Current theoretical frameworks for attention are based almost exclusively on studies in visual cortex, where attentional effects are typically modest and excitatory. In contrast, attentional effects in auditory cortex can be large and suppressive. A theoretical framework for explaining attentional effects in auditory cortex is lacking, preventing a broader understanding of cortical mechanisms underlying attention. Here, we present a cortical network model of attention in primary auditory cortex (A1). A key mechanism in our network is attentional inhibitory modulation (AIM) of cortical inhibitory neurons. In this mechanism, top-down inhibitory neurons disinhibit bottom-up cortical circuits, a prominent circuit motif observed in sensory cortex. Our results reveal that the same underlying mechanisms in the AIM network can explain diverse attentional effects on both spatial and frequency tuning in A1. We find that a dominant effect of disinhibition on cortical tuning is suppressive, consistent with experimental observations. Functionally, the AIM network may play a key role in solving the cocktail party problem. We demonstrate how attention can guide the AIM network to monitor an acoustic scene, select a specific target, or switch to a different target, providing flexible outputs for solving the cocktail party problem.

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Section: Alternative/additional Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 85%

AIM: A network model of attention in auditory cortex

Chou

Sen

2021

PLoS Comput Biol

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“…Recent studies (see, e.g., Ref. 27 ) have also indicated that effects in the auditory cortex are stronger when using complex lifelike speech stimuli consisting of full sentences, rather than simple phonemes 25 or words 21 , because the variability in such stimuli is larger causing less neural adaptation 28 . Also, lifelike speech tasks may engage participants more than less naturalistic tasks 27 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain activity during shadowing of audiovisual cocktail party speech, contributions of auditory–motor integration and selective attention

Wikman

Ylinen

Leminen

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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Selective listening to cocktail-party speech involves a network of auditory and inferior frontal cortical regions. However, cognitive and motor cortical regions are differentially activated depending on whether the task emphasizes semantic or phonological aspects of speech. Here we tested whether processing of cocktail-party speech differs when participants perform a shadowing (immediate speech repetition) task compared to an attentive listening task in the presence of irrelevant speech. Participants viewed audiovisual dialogues with concurrent distracting speech during functional imaging. Participants either attentively listened to the dialogue, overtly repeated (i.e., shadowed) attended speech, or performed visual or speech motor control tasks where they did not attend to speech and responses were not related to the speech input. Dialogues were presented with good or poor auditory and visual quality. As a novel result, we show that attentive processing of speech activated the same network of sensory and frontal regions during listening and shadowing. However, in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), peak activations during shadowing were posterior to those during listening, suggesting that an anterior–posterior distinction is present for motor vs. perceptual processing of speech already at the level of the auditory cortex. We also found that activations along the dorsal auditory processing stream were specifically associated with the shadowing task. These activations are likely to be due to complex interactions between perceptual, attention dependent speech processing and motor speech generation that matches the heard speech. Our results suggest that interactions between perceptual and motor processing of speech relies on a distributed network of temporal and motor regions rather than any specific anatomical landmark as suggested by some previous studies.

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“…Several neuroimaging studies have also examined wholebrain cortical responses to natural speech in a cocktail-party setting (Nakai et al 2005;Alho et al 2006;Hill and Miller 2010;Ikeda et al 2010;Wild et al 2012;Regev et al 2019;Wikman et al 2021). In the study of Hill and Miller (2010), subjects were given an attention cue (attend to pitch, attend to location or rest) and later exposed to multiple speech stimuli where they performed the cued task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multitalker Environment

et al. 2021

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Humans are remarkably adept in listening to a desired speaker in a crowded environment, while filtering out nontarget 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 blood-oxygen-level-dependent (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 toward 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 multispeaker environments.

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Breaking down the cocktail party: Attentional modulation of cerebral audiovisual speech processing

Cited by 15 publications

References 91 publications

AIM: A network model of attention in auditory cortex

AIM: A network model of attention in auditory cortex

Brain activity during shadowing of audiovisual cocktail party speech, contributions of auditory–motor integration and selective attention

Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multitalker Environment

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