Spatial Attention in Interfering Speech Perception

This study aimed to explore how listeners selectively attend to speech in a noisy environment with complex sound sources. Participants were firstly instructed to attend to a specified speaker among 5. Subsequently, they were exposed to white noise played from all speakers for 500 ms followed by a speech signal played from the target location while ignoring speech from another speaker. EEG responses were recorded and an-alyzed using Inter-Trial Phase Coherence and Event-Related Spectral Perturbation. Our results demonstrated that the theta and alpha frequencies are crucial in reflecting auditory attention allocation. Specifically, ITPC was sensitive to the left-right division of attention, whereas ERSP, particularly in alpha power, may be more effective in differentiating adjacent locations dynamically.