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Attention to Speech in the Ascending Auditory Nervous System: an EEG Investigation.

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Brett M. Bormann^1,2 (), Daniel C. Comstock¹, Kelsey Mankel^1,3,4, Soukhin Das^1,5, Hilary Brodie⁶, Doron Sagiv⁶, Lee M. Miller^1,6,7; ¹Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, ²Neuroscience Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, ³Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, ⁴School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Memphis, ⁵Psychology Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, ⁶Departments of Otolaryngology | Head and Neck Surgery, University of California, Davis, ⁷Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis

The majority of EEG research of auditory attention to speech has primarily focused on high-level processing in the cortex, while not exploring the interconnected role of attention along the ascending auditory nervous system. We posit that challenging speech listening requires both feedforward and feedback communication in the auditory pathway as early as the brainstem. For this project, 109 military Veterans performed a novel continuous speech spatial attention task. Participants were simultaneously presented with two spatially separated narratives. While attending to the target narrative and ignoring the distractor narrative, the participants’ neural activity was recorded with EEG. Both narratives utilized our chirped speech (Cheech) stimuli which simultaneously facilitated a robust auditory brainstem response (ABR), middle latency response (MLR), and late latency response (LLR). This method enables us to investigate how ecologically relevant stimuli influences the neural activity from cochlea to cortex. We specifically investigated the relationship of attentional modulations across different levels of the auditory nervous system. Multiple regression models were used to evaluate the relationship of ERP morphology (peak amplitude, peak latency, and area under the curve) for components across different levels of the auditory nervous system. Differences in attentional modulations across ABR, MLR, & LLR components were significantly correlated. These correlated modulations across brain areas demonstrates the interconnected relationship of attention in the ascending auditory nervous system, showing the influence of attention spreading across all levels of auditory processing.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory