Decoding listener’s attention :Can it be improved with behavioural measure of selective attention?

Abstract

During the past decade, there has been growing interest in the neural correlates of selective attention to speech. In these studies, listeners were instructed to focus their attention on one of two concurrent speech streams. However, in everyday-life situations, a listener's attention can switch rapidly between different voices. Thus, we have developed a behavioural protocol to infer the dynamics of auditory attention over time. After listening to two simultaneous stories—a target and an interferer—the participants have to find, among a set of words, those present in the target story. The participant’s responses are then used to estimate, retrospectively, when their attention was directed toward the target, or toward the interferer. Neural data, recorded with EEG, and behavioural measures are combined to extract the brain's temporal response function in response to these stimuli. Moreover, to promote attention switches between the two voices, the interferers were uttered by the same talker as the target stories, but the voice parameters were manipulated to parametrically control the similarity of the two voices. We will discuss the results in terms of attentional selection and voice confusion, and suggest possible applications of this dynamic behavioral test of selective auditory attention.