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Abstract
Remembering what a speaker said depends on attention. During conversational speech, the emphasis is on working memory, but listening to a lecture encourages episodic memory encoding. With simultaneous interference from background speech, the need for auditory vigilance increases. We recreated these context-dependent demands on auditory attention in 2 ways. The first was to require participants to attend to one speaker in either the absence or presence of a distracting background speaker. The second was to alter the task demand, requiring either an immediate or delayed recall of the content of the attended speech. Across 2 fMRI studies, common activated regions associated with segregating attended from unattended speech were the right anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum (aI/FOp), the left planum temporale, and the precuneus. In contrast, activity in a ventral right frontoparietal system was dependent on both the task demand and the presence of a competing speaker. Additional multivariate analyses identified other domain-general frontoparietal systems, where activity increased during attentive listening but was modulated little by the need for speech stream segregation in the presence of 2 speakers. These results make predictions about impairments in attentive listening in different communicative contexts following focal or diffuse brain pathology.
Highlights
Listening to a speaker so that what was said is understood and remembered requires attention
Summary of Findings From Study 1 Component 2 of the independent components analysis (ICA) analysis demonstrated that bilateral primary and association auditory cortex responded in a “bottomup” manner to stimuli of increasing auditory complexity: Silence
Components 3 and 4 demonstrated that overlapping networks within auditory cortex were demonstrating correlated activity with multiple higherorder systems: the bilateral cingulo-opercular and inferior frontal sulci (IFS)/intraparietal sulcus (IPS) networks, and the ventral right frontoparietal network (MFG/SMG) and precuneus that was evident as the main effect of listening to 2 speakers in the univariate whole-brain ANOVA
Summary
Listening to a speaker so that what was said is understood and remembered requires attention. The duration of both attention and the time over which the content of what was heard has to be remembered is influenced by context. Taking turns during conversations depends on periods of brief attentive listening, with memory focused principally on what was just said before making a response. In this context, the emphasis is on working memory. Attendance at a lecture is an hour well spent only if the listener reliably maintains attention over time while encoding details of the semantic content of the lecture as enduring memories. We often hear speech in social situations, so that the “attended”
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