Attentional Modulation of Hierarchical Speech Representations in a Multitalker Environment.

ABSTRACT: 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 wer

SUBMITTER: Kiremitci I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8491717 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature