An alternative approach for auditory attention tracking using single-trial EEG
Bradley Ekin, Les Atlas, Majid Mirbagheri, Adrian K. C. Lee · 2016
Auditory selective attention plays a central role in the human capacity to reliably process complex sounds in multi-source environments. Stimulus reconstruction has been widely used for the investigation of selective auditory attention using multichannel electroencephalogra-phy (EEG). In particular, the influence of attention on sound representations in the brain has been modeled by linear time-variant filters and have been used to track the attentional state of individuals in multi-source environments. Detection of auditory attention is of interest and is important in the study of attention-related disorders and has potential application in the hearing aid and advertising industries. In analogy with the rake receiver from wireless communications, we propose a new strategy, adapting principles from minimum variance beamforming, to reconstruct stimuli for decoding the at-tentional state of listeners in a competing speaker environment. We show through experiments with real electrophysiological data how decoding accuracies can be improved using our proposed scheme.