Cortical dynamics of speech processing in the cocktail party: Enhancement effects of masker priming

Abstract

In auditory neuroscience, the temporal response function (TRF) method represents a linear regression between neural responses and the temporal evolution of acoustic features, such as the slow envelope of speech. This technique allows the study of the 'cocktail party effect', a relevant problem in neuroscience that concerns the ability to understand a message despite the presence of simultaneous conversations. Involvement of selective attention typically leads to an increased cortical representation of attended speech between 100-200 ms Brodbeck et al., 2020), which does not occur with the ignored message. However, familiarity with speech, the priming effect, could decrease such neural responses (Wang et al., 2017). (Tomado de introducción)