Breaking down the cocktail party: Attentional modulation of cerebral audiovisual speech processing

Recent studies utilizing electrophysiological speech envelope reconstruction have sparked renewed interest in the cocktail party effect by showing that auditory neurons entrain to selectively attended speech. Yet, neural networks of attention naturalistic audiovisual settings with multiple sound sources remain poorly understood. We collected functional brain imaging data while participants viewed video clips lifelike dialogues concurrent distracting background. Dialogues were presented a full-factorial design, comprising task (listen vs. ignore them), quality and semantic predictability. used univariate analyses combination multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) study modulations activity related attentive processing found cause distinct spatiotemporal modulation profiles distributed cortical areas including sensory frontal-control networks. Semantic coherence modulated attention-related activation patterns earliest stages processing, suggesting cortex is involved high-level processing. Our results corroborate views emphasize dynamic nature attention, task-specificity context as cornerstones underlying neuro-cognitive mechanisms.