Task-dependent cortical activations during selective attention to audiovisual speech

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2022-01-15

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en

Pages

16

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Brain Research, Volume 1775

Abstract

Selective listening to speech depends on widespread networks of the brain, but how the involvement of different neural systems in speech processing is affected by factors such as the task performed by a listener and speech intelligibility remains poorly understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to systematically examine the effects that performing different tasks has on neural activations during selective attention to continuous audiovisual speech in the presence of task-irrelevant speech. Participants viewed audiovisual dialogues and attended either to the semantic or the phonological content of speech, or ignored speech altogether and performed a visual control task. The tasks were factorially combined with good and poor auditory and visual speech qualities. Selective attention to speech engaged superior temporal regions and the left inferior frontal gyrus regardless of the task. Frontoparietal regions implicated in selective auditory attention to simple sounds (e.g., tones, syllables) were not engaged by the semantic task, suggesting that this network may not be not as crucial when attending to continuous speech. The medial orbitofrontal cortex, implicated in social cognition, was most activated by the semantic task. Activity levels during the phonological task in the left prefrontal, premotor, and secondary somatosensory regions had a distinct temporal profile as well as the highest overall activity, possibly relating to the role of the dorsal speech processing stream in sub-lexical processing. Our results demonstrate that the task type influences neural activations during selective attention to speech, and emphasize the importance of ecologically valid experimental designs.

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Funding Information: This work received funding from the Academy of Finland (Grant #297848, “Modulation of brain activity patterns during selective attention to speech”, 2016–2021) and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of data, or in the writing of the article. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s)

Keywords

Audiovisual speech processing, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Selective attention to speech, Task-dependent effects

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Citation

Ylinen, A, Wikman, P, Leminen, M & Alho, K 2022, ' Task-dependent cortical activations during selective attention to audiovisual speech ', Brain Research, vol. 1775, 147739 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147739