New paper with our Leipzig friends in the Jour­nal of Neuroscience

The Gesa Hartwigsen lab’s own Vivien Bar­chet and their team in Leipzig with some help from Jonas have just pub­lished a com­pelling study in The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science titled “Atten­tion­al engage­ment with tar­get and dis­trac­tor streams pre­dicts speech com­pre­hen­sion in mul­ti-talk­er envi­ron­ments”. 

In every­day lis­ten­ing scenes—think cock­tail par­ties, cafés, or busy open offices—the brain must not only latch onto the tar­get speak­er but also mon­i­tor how dis­trac­tors are managed.

Here, as part of her doc­tor­al work, Vivien shows that the depth of atten­tion­al engage­ment with both the tar­get and com­pet­ing streams is a strong pre­dic­tor of how well we under­stand speech under such conditions.

Thins work advances our under­stand­ing of selec­tive atten­tion in com­plex acoustic scenes, and also has clear rel­e­vance for our lab’s inter­ests in audi­to­ry scene analy­sis, hear­ing under uncer­tain­ty, and metacog­ni­tion in listening.