Neural systems involved when attending to a speaker
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
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.
Date Issued
2015-01-16
Date Acceptance
2015-01-16
Citation
Cerebral Cortex, 2015, 25 (11), pp.4284-4298
ISSN
1460-2199
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Start Page
4284
End Page
4298
Journal / Book Title
Cerebral Cortex
Volume
25
Issue
11
Copyright Statement
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Sponsor
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Grant Number
G1100423
MR/K014129/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Neurosciences
Neurosciences & Neurology
attention
cognitive control
functional mRI
right anterior insula
speech
INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS
POSTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX
TRAUMATIC BRAIN-INJURY
SELECTIVE ATTENTION
AUDITORY FMRI
NETWORKS
CONNECTIVITY
ARCHITECTURE
SPEECH
ROBUST
Experimental Psychology
1109 Neurosciences
1702 Cognitive Science
Publication Status
Published