Neurophysiological Evidence for Semantic Processing of Irrelevant Speech and Own-Name Detection in a Virtual Café

Adi Brown, Danna Pinto, Ksenia Burgart, Yair Zvilichovsky, Elana Zion-Golumbic

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The well-known "cocktail party effect" refers to incidental detection of salient words, such as one s own-name, in supposedly unattended speech. However, empirical investigation of the prevalence of this phenomenon and the underlying mechanisms has been limited to extremely artificial contexts and has yielded conflicting results. We introduce a novel empirical approach for revisiting this effect under highly ecological conditions, by immersing participants in a multisensory Virtual Café and using realistic stimuli and tasks. Participants (32 female, 18 male) listened to conversational speech from a character at their table, while a barista in the back of the café called out food orders. Unbeknownst to them, the barista sometimes called orders containing either their own-name or words that created semantic violations. We assessed the neurophysiological response-profile to these two probes in the task-irrelevant barista stream by measuring participants brain activity (EEG), galvanic skin response and overt gaze-shifts.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5045-5056
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Neuroscience
Volume43
Issue number27
DOIs
StatePublished - 5 Jul 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Society for Neuroscience. All rights reserved.

Funding

Received Sep. 12, 2022; revised Apr. 18, 2023; accepted Apr. 27, 2023. Author contributions: A.B. and K.B. performed research; A.B., D.P., and K.B. analyzed data; A.B., D.P., and K.B. wrote the first draft of the paper; Y.Z. and E.Z.-G. designed research; Y.Z. contributed unpublished reagents/analytic tools; E.Z.-G. edited the paper; E.Z.-G. wrote the paper. This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation Grant 2339/20 to E.Z.-G. and Israel Ministry of Science Grant 88962 to E.Z.-G. We thank Dr. Maya Kaufman for consulting on stimulus design; and Orel Levi for assistance in data collection. *A.B. and D.P. contributed equally to this work as joint first authors. The authors declare no competing financial interests. Correspondence should be addressed to Elana Zion-Golumbic at [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1731-22.2023 Copyright © 2023 the authors

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation2339/20

    Keywords

    • EEG
    • attention
    • cocktail party
    • incidental detection
    • own-name detection
    • speech processing

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