Top-down control during selective listening in cocktail party situations
Final Report Abstract
Listening to a speaker in background noise or in the presence of competing speech input, for example at a crowded cocktail party, is a challenging task. It places high demands on the low-level sensory processing of sound, but also on high-level auditory cognition, such as attention control. The funded research project, which was conducted at the Montreal Neurological Institute (host: Dr. Robert J. Zatorre), investigated the neural basis of successful cocktail-party listening. In study I, simultaneous EEG-fMRI was used to study brain processes underlying the attentional gating of auditory sensory information during cocktail-party listening. We showed that neural activity in auditory cortex selectively tracked attended speech, whereas neural responses to competing irrelevant input were suppressed. Individual differences in the neural tracking of attended speech were positively correlated with behavioral measures of selective auditory attention. On the neural level, activity in the right temporoparietal junction, which is a core region of the ventral attention network, was related to individual speech tracking abilities, suggesting that this region contributes to controlling auditory attention during cocktail-party listening. Studies II and III then investigated effects of musical training on selective listening abilities in cocktail-party situations. Previous work demonstrated that musicians often outperform subjects without musical training when listening to speech in background noise. Why musical training benefits speech perception is however largely unknown. In our studies, we provide evidence that musical training is associated with a superior sensory processing of temporal auditory information, which may benefit auditory stream segregation, as well as with increased auditory working memory. Moreover, we observed musical training-related increases in functional connectivity between brain regions involved in the processing of low-level auditory sensory information and speech. Surprisingly, though, while musical training was indeed associated with superior selective listening performance in cocktailparty settings, this effect was not related to an effective suppression of irrelevant speech at the level of auditory cortex. Instead, musicians tracked both attended and ignored speech, up to late processing stages. This unexpected result poses the exciting question whether information on irrelevant and potentially distracting input can be used by the brain to effectively limit interference during selective listening.
Publications
- 2017. The right temporoparietal junction supports speech tracking during selective listening: Evidence from concurrent EEG-fMRI, The Journal of Neuroscience 37, 11505–11516
Puschmann S, Steinkamp SR, Gillich I, Mirkovic B, Debener S, Thiel CM
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1007-17.2017) - 2018. Musicians at the cocktail party: Neural substrates of musical training during selective listening in multispeaker situations, Cerebral Cortex 29, 3253–3265
Puschmann S, Baillet S, Zatorre RZ
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy193) - 2019. Hearing-impaired listeners show increased audiovisual benefit when listening to speech in noise. Neuroimage 196, 261–268
Puschmann S, Daeglau M, Stropahl M, Mirkovic B, Rosemann S, Thiel CM, Debener S
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.04.017)
