# Towards auditory attention decoding with noise-tagging: A pilot study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15523/

## Key facts

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- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2024.

## Abstract (arXiv)

Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to extract from brain activity the attended speaker amidst candidate speakers, offering promising applications for neuro-steered hearing devices and brain-computer interfacing. This pilot study makes a first step towards AAD using the noise-tagging stimulus protocol, which evokes reliable code-modulated evoked potentials, but is minimally explored in the auditory modality. Participants were sequentially presented with two Dutch speech stimuli that were amplitude-modulated with a unique binary pseudo-random noise-code, effectively tagging these with additional decodable information. We compared the decoding of unmodulated audio against audio modulated with various modulation depths, and a conventional AAD method against a standard method to decode noise-codes. Our pilot study revealed higher performances for the conventional method with 70 to 100 percent modulation depths compared to unmodulated audio. The noise-code decoder did not further improve these results. These fundamental insights highlight the potential of integrating noise-codes in speech to enhance auditory speaker detection when multiple speakers are presented simultaneously.