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Quantifying attentional modulation of auditory-evoked cortical responses from single-trial electroencephalography
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Quantifying attentional modulation of auditory-evoked cortical responses from single-trial electroencephalography

Inyong Choi, Siddharth Rajaram, Lenny A Varghese and Barbara G Shinn-Cunningham
Frontiers in human neuroscience, Vol.7(2013), pp.115-115
04/04/2013
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00115
PMCID: PMC3616343
PMID: 23576968
url
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00115View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Selective auditory attention is essential for human listeners to be able to communicate in multi-source environments. Selective attention is known to modulate the neural representation of the auditory scene, boosting the representation of a target sound relative to the background, but the strength of this modulation, and the mechanisms contributing to it, are not well understood. Here, listeners performed a behavioral experiment demanding sustained, focused spatial auditory attention while we measured cortical responses using electroencephalography (EEG). We presented three concurrent melodic streams; listeners were asked to attend and analyze the melodic contour of one of the streams, randomly selected from trial to trial. In a control task, listeners heard the same sound mixtures, but performed the contour judgment task on a series of visual arrows, ignoring all auditory streams. We found that the cortical responses could be fit as weighted sum of event-related potentials evoked by the stimulus onsets in the competing streams. The weighting to a given stream was roughly 10 dB higher when it was attended compared to when another auditory stream was attended; during the visual task, the auditory gains were intermediate. We then used a template-matching classification scheme to classify single-trial EEG results. We found that in all subjects, we could determine which stream the subject was attending significantly better than by chance. By directly quantifying the effect of selective attention on auditory cortical responses, these results reveal that focused auditory attention both suppresses the response to an unattended stream and enhances the response to an attended stream. The single-trial classification results add to the growing body of literature suggesting that auditory attentional modulation is sufficiently robust that it could be used as a control mechanism in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
 Life Sciences & Biomedicine Neurosciences Neurosciences & Neurology Psychology Science & Technology Social Sciences

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