Gehmacher, Quirin;
Schubert, Juliane;
Schmidt, Fabian;
Hartmann, Thomas;
Reisinger, Patrick;
Rösch, Sebastian;
Schwarz, Konrad;
... Weisz, Nathan; + view all
(2024)
Eye movements track prioritized auditory features in selective attention to natural speech.
Nature Communications
, 15
, Article 3692. 10.1038/s41467-024-48126-2.
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Abstract
Over the last decades, cognitive neuroscience has identified a distributed set of brain regions that are critical for attention. Strong anatomical overlap with brain regions critical for oculomotor processes suggests a joint network for attention and eye movements. However, the role of this shared network in complex, naturalistic environments remains understudied. Here, we investigated eye movements in relation to (un)attended sentences of natural speech. Combining simultaneously recorded eye tracking and magnetoencephalographic data with temporal response functions, we show that gaze tracks attended speech, a phenomenon we termed ocular speech tracking. Ocular speech tracking even differentiates a target from a distractor in a multi-speaker context and is further related to intelligibility. Moreover, we provide evidence for its contribution to neural differences in speech processing, emphasizing the necessity to consider oculomotor activity in future research and in the interpretation of neural differences in auditory cognition.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Eye movements track prioritized auditory features in selective attention to natural speech |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41467-024-48126-2 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48126-2 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > The Ear Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10192065 |
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