Eye movements track prioritized auditory features in selective attention to natural speech

Quirin Gehmacher (), Juliane Schubert, Fabian Schmidt, Thomas Hartmann, Patrick Reisinger, Sebastian Rösch, Konrad Schwarz, Tzvetan Popov, Maria Chait and Nathan Weisz
Additional contact information
Quirin Gehmacher: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Juliane Schubert: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Fabian Schmidt: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Thomas Hartmann: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Patrick Reisinger: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience
Sebastian Rösch: Head and Neck Surgery, Paracelsus Medical University Salzburg
Konrad Schwarz: MED-EL GmbH
Tzvetan Popov: Department of Psychology, University of Zurich
Maria Chait: University College London
Nathan Weisz: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48126-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-48126-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48126-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().