Abstract
Subjective experience suggests that we are able to direct our auditory attention independent of our visual gaze, e.g when shadowing a nearby conversation at a cocktail party. But what are the consequences at the behavioural and neural level? While numerous studies have investigated both auditory attention and visual gaze independently, little is known about their interaction during selective listening. In the present EEG study, we manipulated visual gaze independently of auditory attention while participants detected targets presented from one of three loudspeakers. We observed increased response times when gaze was directed away from the locus of auditory attention. Further, we found an increase in occipital alpha-band power contralateral to the direction of gaze, indicative of a suppression of distracting input. Finally, this condition also led to stronger central theta-band power, which correlated with the observed effect in response times, indicative of differences in top-down processing. Our data suggest that a misalignment between gaze and auditory attention both reduce behavioural performance and modulate underlying neural processes. The involvement of central theta-band and occipital alpha-band effects are in line with compensatory neural mechanisms such as increased cognitive control and the suppression of task irrelevant inputs.
Highlights
In most natural listening situations, the focus of auditory attention (“where we are listening to”) is aligned with visual gaze direction (“where we are looking at”)
Participants had a higher false alarm rate (FA) rate during the coherent compared to the incoherent condition
In the present study we investigated the impact of task irrelevant visual gaze direction on auditory processing, and report three main findings
Summary
In most natural listening situations, the focus of auditory attention (“where we are listening to”) is aligned with visual gaze direction (“where we are looking at”). Irrespective of gaze direction, a large number of electroencephalographic (EEG) studies in humans have shown that endogenous auditory attention can amplify event related potentials (ERPs) to sounds as early as 20 ms after stimulus onset[10,11,12,13] These early attentional effects are thought to reflect a sensory selection mechanism, based on readily discriminable features such as spatial location[10, 14]. Alpha-band activity has been suggested to act as a local sensory gating mechanism, by which processing of relevant sensory inputs is enhanced and irrelevant input is suppressed[20] Indicative of this, both visual and auditory spatial attention have been shown to induce lateralized changes in occipital alpha-band www.nature.com/scientificreports/. While the topography of alpha-band modulation for visual and auditory attention overlaps, the underlying networks for the two modalities are likely distinct[18, 21]
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