Article
The Interplay of Attention and Gaze Direction in EEG and Audio Envelope Analysis (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Understanding the mechanisms behind the brain's ability to distinguish sounds in a noisy environment and to focus on a specific source is of key scientific interest. Recent investigations have highlighted a link between brain potentials recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) and audio envelopes for decoding the attended audio source. Here we investigate the impact of gaze direction and attention on EEG envelope decoding.We designed an experiment with two free-field speech sources, i.e., instead of utilizing headphones, we played audio from hidden loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber. Normal-hearing participants were instructed to focus on one speech source while maintaining their gaze consistently toward a fixation point near the attended or the unattended speaker while their EEG was recorded. The goal was to investigate the degree of correlation between the EEG and the attended speech source and to determine the gaze direction's impact. Using temporal response function (TRF) and regression models, preliminary data analysis demonstrated stronger correlations between EEG signals and the attended audio envelopes than the unattended audio envelopes. In contrast, we did not observe significant variations in correlation values when examining different gaze fixation points. Based on our initial findings, attention decoding is unaffected by gaze direction.