Predicting listeners' attentional bias toward the human voice: perceptual, neural, and semantic factors.

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Picture a girl playing on the playground: She hears the roar of wind in the trees, the whirr of cars driving by, the voice of another child talking to her, and music emanating from an electronic toy. She could attend to any one of these sounds, and yet her attention is likely to be quickly grasped by the human voice. One of the most common tasks humans do on a daily basis is selectively attend to sounds that are relevant for communication, while actively ignoring other sounds that are so prevalent in our busy auditory environments. This is a surprisingly complex job, especially for developing listeners, and yet my previous research uncovered a persistent attentional bias toward speech in complex scenes for infants, children, and adults. My research program is designed to uncover how it is that listeners of all ages are biased to attend to speech in busy acoustic environments, when many other sounds compete for attention. The goal of this work is to characterize the perceptual, cognitive, and neural building blocks of human communication in real-world scenarios from infancy to adulthood. Although listeners of all ages show an attentional speech bias in complex scenes, the factors that drive attention toward speech from infancy to adulthood may differ due to burgeoning cognitive abilities. Using a two-stage approach, I first propose behavioural studies that characterize acoustic and semantic drivers of the attentional speech bias in early childhood and adulthood. Second, I explore a neural index of attention to speech and non-speech sounds in complex scenes using non-the invasive neuroimaging technique of EEG. This NSERC DG proposal will uncover how listeners of all ages are biased to attend to speech in complex scenes through the following questions: 1. What is the attentional speech bias? A bias toward certain types of salient acoustic characteristics or a bias toward semantically meaningful signals? 2. Do the drivers of the attentional speech bias change in childhood to adulthood because of perceptual and cognitive development in infants and preschoolers? 3. Can neural measures be used to index attention to speech and non-speech sounds in busy scenes, especially in infancy? An in-depth understanding of our remarkable ability to attend to speech in busy listening settings will lead to the development of early and effective interventions for listeners of all ages that struggle to comprehend speech in busy scenes. We will develop innovative neural methods that provide a window into the infant listening experience and will characterize the typical attentional hierarchy for real world sounds in complex scenes. These findings can be leveraged in workplaces where detecting a change can be mission critical, such as the Armed Forces. Together the behavioural and neural studies outlined in this proposal will move basic science one step closer to understanding how humans of all ages successfully communicate in the real world.