When we listen to two competing speakers, we can selectively attend one of them and understand that talker while ignoring the other one. Here we show that this selective attention to speech involves cortical responses at the fundamental frequency of a speech signal. We measure speech-evoked activities in the auditory cortex through magnetoencaphalography (MEG), and relate it to the fundamental frequency of a particular speaker. We then show that these neural responses are significantly larger when the speaker is attended then when they are ignored. Because the neural response occurs at a comparatively short delay of about 35 ms, its attentional modulation likely results from top-down feedback from higher processing centers.
A. Schüller, A. Schilling, P. Krauss, S. Rampp, T. Reichenbach,
Attentional modulation of the cortical contribution to the frequency-following response evoked by continuous speech,
J. Neurosci. (2023) 43:7429 [bioRxiv][pdf]