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 language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5045-5056 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Journal of Neuroscience |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue number | 27 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 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data; A.B., D.P., and K.B. wrote the first draft of the paper; Y.Z. and E.Z.-G. designed research; Y.Z. contributed unpublished reagents/analytic tools; E.Z.-G. edited the paper; E.Z.-G. wrote the paper.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
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Israel Science Foundation | 2339/20 |
Keywords
- EEG
- attention
- cocktail party
- incidental detection
- own-name detection
- speech processing