Tracking selective attention in a musical cocktail

• Main Author: Low, Cassia Man Ting
• Other Authors: Balázs Zoltán Gulyás
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Science::Medicine; Science::Biological sciences
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/153714
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The cocktail party effect refers to mankind’s ability to focus attention on a single sound within a noisy environment. Using magnetoencephalography, we investigated this cognitive phenomenon by utilizing frequency-tagging to first precisely separate and identify individual neural responses (i.e. ASSRs) according to their driving source from a mixture elicited by multiple stimuli. Participants directed attention to one out of a few musical streams as we examined how selective attention influences the corresponding ASSR. Distributed source analyses revealed that the ASSR enhancements from top-down and bottom-up attention were strongest at the frontal and temporal lobes respectively. Notably, we discovered that many characteristics of the ASSR, including its sensitivity to participants’ musicality, differed during and after auditory stimulation, and when the number of simultaneous streams increased. The ability to readily capture attentional modulation in a stimulus-precise manner makes the ASSR a useful tool for investigating selective attention and its interaction with individual factors such as musical training. Importantly, this work advances the study of human cognition towards more complex and naturalistic soundscapes using frequency-tagging.