Out now in EJN: Troby Lui, Jonas Obleser, & Malte Wöstmann show that the listening brain extracts subtle statistical regularities from a sequence of irrelevant speech items. Prediction of distractors is not fully automatic but depends on the availability of perceptual and cognitive resources. We believe that these findings help understand potential benefits of predictable distractors for goal-directed neural processing and its dependence on perceptual and cognitive resource limitations.
This is the final study of Malte’s DFG project Understanding the temporal dynamics of the auditory attentional filter. PhD candidate Max Schulz and Malte are already busy working on the follow up project Understanding capture and suppression in auditory attention. Stay tuned for more insights into the intricate dynamics of attention!