Neural representation of auditory sound categories across cognitive tasks in electroencephalography.

Auditory processing is influenced by task goals, which shape how we perceive and prioritize sound stimuli. Speech, a key category for human communication, often coexists with sounds such as music, environmental sounds, and noise. Tasks that require either comprehending speech in a noisy environment or scanning for multiple sound categories engage distinct neural mechanisms. To investigate these task-driven modulations, participants were exposed to the same auditory scene, composed of speech, music, other sound categories, and noise, under two distinct goals: focusing solely on speech or identifying all sound categories. EEG recordings and an attentional decoding method were used to reconstruct the original sound categories from brain activity. The findings revealed distinct behavioral and neural patterns across sound categories, demonstrating that each category is associated with different reconstructed spectrotemporal modulation profiles. Notably, speech showed the strongest neural tracking, particularly in the comprehension task compared to the detection task. These results show that task goals not only shape attentional allocation but also influence the neural representation of sound. This demonstrates the flexibility of the auditory system in adapting to cognitive demands, shedding light on how selective attention dynamically shapes auditory processing.