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Poster C36 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink

Properties of distracting speech affect attentional entrainment to audiovisual “cocktail-party” speech

Patrik Wikman1, Alessandra Bombino1, Artturi Ylinen1, Ilkka Muukkonen1 (); 1University of Helsinki, 2Department of Psychology and Logopedics

The attentional effects caused by characteristics of unattended speech in cocktail-party settings are poorly understood. We measured EEG (n = 19) and fMRI (n = 20) to naturalistic audiovisual dialogues with concurrent distracting speech, varying in semantic and physical similarity to the attended speaker. We used EEG speech reconstruction analysis to study how the temporal dynamics of selective attention depended on features of the unattended speech, across and within sentences. For the fMRI data we used representational similarity analysis, Procustes analysis, and hierarchical clustering to explore spatiotemporal changes in attentional modulation across sentences. Attentional entrainment to the relevant speech stream was affected by the properties of distracting speech. The fMRI data revealed that the representational structure of attended speech changed distinctly across time in different nodes of the speech processing network. We underscore the value of using multiple measurement techniques, incorporating different spatial and timescales, in attention research.

Keywords: cocktail-party speech attention RSA hyperaligement 

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