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Speech Processing in the Wild: EEG research goes to school
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Elana Zion Golumbic1; 1Bar Ilan University
Understanding speech processing in dynamic and noisy real-life environments, is a core translational challenge of cognitive neuroscience, which is not well capture in laboratory experiments. To bridge this gap, instead of bringing participants to the lab, here we brought a mobile-lab to a real-life environment where natural speech-processing and attention to speech are especially challenging: a typical high-school classroom. We recorded neural activity (EEG), gaze and body motions from N=100 students, who viewed educational videos in their organic classroom, interspersed with occasional ecological disturbances consisting of other students talking. First, we verified that reliable neural speech-tracking responses could be obtained in this real-life mobile-EEG setting, and compared results to a parallel lab-based study using identical material. Next, we tested how learning-outcomes, neural speech tracking, gaze and posture were affected by the presence of background speech disturbances, and characterized the neural response to the disturbances themselves. We found that performance and neural speech tracking were negatively affected by background speech, however analysis of gaze and posture suggest investment of effort to maintain attention to the lecture despite the disturbances. We also found significant effects of time-on-task, with all measures associated with attention and speech processing deteriorating over the course of the lesson. Exploratory analysis further reveal interesting individual differences in both the effect that background disturbances have on speech processing and the trajectory of changes over time. This work emphasizes the feasibility and significance of conducting field-based neuroscientific research and demonstrate the importance of considering brain-body-behavior interactions in real-life speech processing.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes