Paying Attention to Speech: The Role of Cognitive Capacity and Acquired Experience

Lambez, Bar; Agmon, Galit; Har-Shai, Paz; Rassovsky, Yuri; Golumbic, Elana Zion

doi:10.1101/655274

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, pitch separation between two competing speakers (operationalized as same vs. different biological gender) also improved performance, but only when spatially separated. Critically, although Distributed attention is overall more difficult than Selective Attention, resulting in reduced performance in this study as well as previous work (Baldock et al, 2018; Best et al, 2006; Brungart, 2001; Koelewijn et al, 2014; Lambez et al, 2019), spatial separation affected performance on both tasks in a similar fashion, with no significant interaction between them. The lack of a difference between the effects of spatial cues on these two extremely different types of attentional tasks leads us to suggest that spatial cues play a limited role in directing top-down attention in multi-speaker environment, beyond their contribution to stream segregation.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

Pinto

Agmon

2020

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Processing speech in multi-speaker environments poses substantial challenges to the human perceptual and attention system. Moreover, different contexts may require employing different listening strategies. For instance, in some cases individuals pay attention Selectively to one speaker and attempt to ignore all other task-irrelevant sounds, whereas other contexts may require listeners to Distribute their attention among several speakers. Spatial and spectral acoustic cues both play an important role in assisting listeners to segregate concurrent speakers. However, how these cues interact with varying demands for allocating top-down attention is less clear. In the current study, we test and compare how spatial cues are utilized to benefit performance on these different types of attentional tasks. To this end, participants listened to a concoction of two or four speakers, presented either as emanating from different locations in space or with no spatial separation. In separate trials, participants were required to employ different listening strategies, and detect a target-word spoken either by one pre-defined speaker (Selective Attention) or spoken by any of the speakers (Distributed Attention). Results indicate that the presence of spatial cues improved performance, particularly in the two-speaker condition, which is in line with the important role of spatial cues in stream segregation. However, spatial cues provided similar benefits to performance under Selective and Distributed attention. This pattern suggests that despite the advantage of spatial cues for stream segregation, they were nonetheless insufficient for directing a more focused ‘attentional spotlight’ towards the location of a designated speaker in the Selective attention condition.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

Pinto

Agmon

2020

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“…Rather, they invite a more flexible account of the processing bottlenecks within the speech processing system, which takes into consideration the perceptual and cognitive load imposed by competing stimuli in a given context, in line with load theory of attention 88,90,97–99 . As observed here, this allows for some degree of parallel processing of concurrent speech, at least under conditions where these loads are not excessively high, but are similar to those encountered in real-life 93 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 63%

“…Supporting this perspective, others have also observed that the level of processing applied to task-irrelevant stimuli can be affected by task demands 91,92 . Moreover, individual differences in attentional abilities, and particularly the ability to process concurrent speech, have been attributed partially to working memory capacity, a trait associated with the availability of more cognitive resources 39,93–85 but cf. 96 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Detecting the phrasal structure of task-irrelevant speech, while focusing primarily on processing the attended speech, likely requires substantial working memory for integrating chunks of information over time. Indeed, attention and working-memory are tightly linked constructs 111,116,117 , and as mentioned above, the ability to control and maintain attention is often associated with individual working memory capacity 39,93–95,118 . Therefore, one possible interpretation for the presence of a phrase-level response to task-irrelevant speech in the left posterior-parietal cortex, is that it assists in forming and maintaining a representation of task-irrelevant stimuli in working memory, perhaps as a means for monitoring the environment for potentially important events 81 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

Yahav

Golumbic

2020

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Paying attention to one speaker in noisy environments can be extremely difficult. This is because task-irrelevant speech competes for processing resources with attended speech. However, whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference, or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well, remains highly debated. To address this debate, here we test whether task-irrelevant speech sounds are integrated over time to form hierarchical representations of lexical and syntactic structures.Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) during a dichotic listening task, where human participants attended to natural speech presented to one ear, and task-irrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables (Non-Structured), or syllables ordered to form coherent sentences (Structured). Using hierarchical frequency-tagging, the neural signature of different linguistic-hierarchies within the Structured stimuli – namely words, phrases and sentences – can be uniquely discerned from the neural response.We find that, indeed, the phrasal structure of task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response, primarily in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions. Moreover, neural tracking of attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when task-irrelevant stimuli were linguistically structured. This pattern suggests that syntactic structurebuilding processes are applied to task-irrelevant speech, at least under these circumstances, and that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Rather, the inherent competition for linguistic processing resources between the two streams likely results in the increased listening effort experienced when trying to focus selective attention in multi-speaker contexts.Significance statementThis study addresses the fundamental question of how the brain deals with competing speech in noisy environments. Specifically, we ask: when one attempts to focus their attention on a particular speaker, what level of linguistic processing is applied to other, task-irrelevant speech? By measuring neural activity, we find evidence that the phrasal structure of task-irrelevant speech is indeed discerned, indicating that linguistic information is integrated over time and undergoes some syntactic analysis. Moreover, neural responses to attended speech were also enhanced in speech-processing regions, when presented together with comprehensible yet task-irrelevant speech. These results nicely demonstrate the inherent competition for linguistic processing resources among concurrent speech, providing evidence that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech.

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“…The stimuli and paradigm used here were similar to that used in a previous behavioral study (Lambez et al 2020). Participants were presented with sequences of short mono-syllabic Hebrew nouns (e.g., "Kad"; pitcher in Hebrew).…”

Section: Stimuli -Attention Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention to speech: Mapping distributed and selective attention systems

Agmon¹,

Yahav²,

Ben-Shachar

et al. 2021

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Daily life is full of situations where many people converse at the same time. Under these noisy circumstances, individuals can employ different listening strategies to deal with the abundance of sounds around them. In this fMRI study we investigated how applying two different listening strategies, Selective vs. Distributed attention, affects the pattern of neural activity. Specifically, in a simulated cocktail party paradigm, we compared brain activation patterns when listeners attend selectively to only one speaker and ignore all others, versus when they distribute their attention and attempt to follow two or four speakers at the same time. Results indicate that the two attention types activate a highly overlapping, bilateral fronto-temporal-parietal network of functionally connected regions. This network includes auditory association cortex (bilateral STG/STS) and higher-level regions related to speech processing and attention (bilateral IFG/insula, right MFG, left IPS). Within this network, responses in specific areas were modulated by the type of attention required. Specifically, auditory and speech-processing regions exhibited higher activity during Distributed attention, whereas fronto-parietal regions were activated more strongly during Selective attention. This pattern suggests that a common perceptual-attentional network is engaged when dealing with competing speech-inputs, regardless of the specific task at hand. At the same time, local activity within nodes of this network varies when implementing different listening strategies, reflecting the different cognitive demands they impose. These results nicely demonstrate the systems flexibility to adapt its internal computations to accommodate different task requirements and listener goals.

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Paying Attention to Speech: The Role of Cognitive Capacity and Acquired Experience

Cited by 4 publications

References 56 publications

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

The Role of Spatial Separation on Selective and Distributed Attention to Speech

Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

Attention to speech: Mapping distributed and selective attention systems

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