Attention modulates early auditory processing at a real cocktail party

ABSTRACTUnderstanding speech in noisy environments is a substantial challenge. Decades of laboratory research have shown that selective attention allows listeners to preferentially process target speech. However, most of this work stripped away the multimodal complexity of the real world. We compared auditory evoked potentials elicited by acoustic onsets in attended and unattended live speech in a room with multiple live talkers. Acoustic onsets in attended speech elicited a larger negativity 100–220 ms, centred around the N1. Additionally, acoustic onsets in speech from a seen talker elicited a larger negativity during this time than onsets in audio-only speech. Further, the attention effect for an unseen talker was observed only when all unattended talkers were unseen as well. A seen talker is both easier to attend and harder to ignore. These results indicate that the more complex conditions encountered during real-life speech-in-noise processing modulate the attentional facilitation of speech perception.