The interplay of top-down focal attention and the cortical tracking of speech

Lesenfants, Damien; Francart, Tom

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-63587-3

Cited by 36 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Here, only for three participants one artifactual channel was identified. Spectral entropy was computed based on the analysis described in Lesenfants and Francart (2020) . For each one-min segment and channel, the spectrum from 8 to 32 Hz was computed using multitaper spectral analysis (7 tapers, MATLAB function: pmtm).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A high spectral entropy indicates an equally distributed EEG spectrum. This means that the power in each frequency band is very similar, whereas a low spectral entropy indicates an EEG spectrum in which the power is concentrated in one frequency band ( Lesenfants and Francart, 2020 ). Lesenfants et al (2018) found increased spectral entropy when participants actively attended to a stimulus compared to when they did not attend to the presented stimulus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Lesenfants et al (2018) found increased spectral entropy when participants actively attended to a stimulus compared to when they did not attend to the presented stimulus. In a consecutive study, Lesenfants and Francart (2020) showed that speech envelope tracking of a single speaker was increased during periods of high spectral entropy. Based on these findings, the authors concluded that high spectral entropy indicates high levels of attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ear-EEG Measures of Auditory Attention to Continuous Speech

et al. 2022

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Auditory attention is an important cognitive function used to separate relevant from irrelevant auditory information. However, most findings on attentional selection have been obtained in highly controlled laboratory settings using bulky recording setups and unnaturalistic stimuli. Recent advances in electroencephalography (EEG) facilitate the measurement of brain activity outside the laboratory, and around-the-ear sensors such as the cEEGrid promise unobtrusive acquisition. In parallel, methods such as speech envelope tracking, intersubject correlations and spectral entropy measures emerged which allow us to study attentional effects in the neural processing of natural, continuous auditory scenes. In the current study, we investigated whether these three attentional measures can be reliably obtained when using around-the-ear EEG. To this end, we analyzed the cEEGrid data of 36 participants who attended to one of two simultaneously presented speech streams. Speech envelope tracking results confirmed a reliable identification of the attended speaker from cEEGrid data. The accuracies in identifying the attended speaker increased when fitting the classification model to the individual. Artifact correction of the cEEGrid data with artifact subspace reconstruction did not increase the classification accuracy. Intersubject correlations were higher for those participants attending to the same speech stream than for those attending to different speech streams, replicating previously obtained results with high-density cap-EEG. We also found that spectral entropy decreased over time, possibly reflecting the decrease in the listener’s level of attention. Overall, these results support the idea of using ear-EEG measurements to unobtrusively monitor auditory attention to continuous speech. This knowledge may help to develop assistive devices that support listeners separating relevant from irrelevant information in complex auditory environments.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ear-EEG Measures of Auditory Attention to Continuous Speech

et al. 2022

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“…We presented the 5-minute blocks on purpose in the beginning and at the end to ensure the decoders we would create based on this data were optimized to decode the different 2-minute speech segments in between. We know, for example, attention and listening effort could shift during the measurement, which could influence neural speech tracking (Ding and Simon, 2012a;Lesenfants and Francart, 2020). To ensure understanding of the storyline, the participants read the story summary before the experiment started.…”

Section: Eeg Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of stimulus intensity on neural envelope tracking

2021

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Objectives In recent years, there has been significant interest in recovering the temporal envelope of a speech signal from the neural response to investigate neural speech processing. The research focus is now broadening from neural speech processing in normal-hearing listeners towards hearing-impaired listeners. When testing hearing-impaired listeners, speech has to be amplified to resemble the effect of a hearing aid and compensate for peripheral hearing loss. Today it is not known with certainty how or if neural speech tracking is influenced by sound amplification. As these higher intensities could influence the outcome, we investigated the influence of stimulus intensity on neural speech tracking.Design We recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) of 20 normal-hearing participants while they listened to a narrated story. The story was presented at intensities from 10 to 80 dB A. To investigate the brain responses, we analyzed neural tracking of the speech envelope by reconstructing the envelope from the EEG using a linear decoder and by correlating the reconstructed with the actual envelope. We investigated the delta (0.5-4 Hz) and the theta (4-8 Hz) band for each intensity. We also investigated the latencies and amplitudes of the responses in more detail using temporal response functions, which are the estimated linear response functions between the stimulus envelope and the EEG.Results Neural envelope tracking is dependent on stimulus intensity in both the TRF and envelope reconstruction analysis. However, provided that the decoder is applied to the same stimulus intensity as it was trained on, envelope reconstruction is robust to stimulus intensity. Besides, neural envelope tracking in the delta (but not theta) band seems to relate to speech intelligibility. Similar to the linear decoder analysis, TRF amplitudes and latencies are dependent on stimulus intensity: The amplitude of peak 1 (30-50 ms) increases, and the latency of peak 2 (140-160 ms) decreases with increasing stimulus intensity.Conclusion Although brain responses are influenced by stimulus intensity, neural envelope tracking is robust to stimulus intensity when using the same intensity to test and train the decoder. Therefore we can assume that intensity will not be a confounder when testing hearing-impaired participants with amplified speech using the linear decoder approach. In addition, neural envelope tracking in the delta band appears to be correlated with speech intelligibility, showing the potential of neural envelope tracking as an objective measure of speech intelligibility.

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“…One possible explanation is that differences in prediction tendency may result in differential allocation of attention depending on individual listening effort. For example, Lesenfants and Francart (2020) found that attention plays a crucial role in the cortical encoding of speech and showed an advanced encoding in frontal & fronto-central electrodes with focal attention. So far, differences in challenging listening situations with low signal-to-noise ratio (such as in a cocktail party situation) have often been linked to individual differences in selective attention (Kerlin et al, 2010).…”

Section: The Influence Of Prediction Tendency On Speech Tracking Decr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual prediction tendencies facilitate cortical speech tracking

Schubert

Schmidt

Gehmacher

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Listening can be conceptualized as a process of active inference, in which the brain forms internal models to predict and integrate auditory information in a complex interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes. Whether inter-individual “prediction tendencies” shape listening experiences of real-world stimuli such as speech is, however, unknown. In the current study, we used a passive paradigm presenting tone sequences of varying entropy level, to independently quantify auditory prediction tendency (as the tendency to anticipate low-level acoustic features according to their contextual probability) for each individual. This measure was then used to predict the magnitude of cortical speech (envelope) tracking in a multi speaker listening task, where participants listened to audiobooks narrated by a target speaker in isolation or interfered by 1 or 2 distractors. Furthermore, rare semantic violations were introduced into the story, enabling us to also examine effects of word surprisal during continuous speech processing. Our results show that individual prediction tendency facilitates cortical speech tracking. Furthermore, we find interactions between individual prediction tendency and background noise as well as word surprisal in disparate brain regions. In sum, our findings suggest that individual prediction tendencies are generalizable across different listening situations and may serve as a valuable element to explain interindividual differences in natural listening experience.

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The interplay of top-down focal attention and the cortical tracking of speech

Cited by 36 publications

References 71 publications

Ear-EEG Measures of Auditory Attention to Continuous Speech

Ear-EEG Measures of Auditory Attention to Continuous Speech

The effect of stimulus intensity on neural envelope tracking

Individual prediction tendencies facilitate cortical speech tracking

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