Neural markers of improved auditory selective attention following neurofeedback training

• DOI: 10.1121/10.0011247
• Publication Date: 2022-05-10T01:12:07Z
• Authors: Hwan Shim; Subong Kim; Jae Hee Lee; Leah Gibbs; Karsyn Rush; Inyong Choi
• Keywords: 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine

We designed a neurofeedback training paradigm to enhance the attentional modulation of cortical auditory evoked responses. Two concurrent speech streams—a female voice repeating “Up” five times and a male voice repeating “Down” four times in three secondsi—were played from left and right loudspeakers, respectively. Subjects were instructed to attend one of those streams by a pre-stimulus visual cue (e.g., “Target: Up”). Attention was decoded from single-trial EEG signals. Subjects received neurofeedback (i.e., a visual object on the computer screen moves upward if the EEG decoder determines the “up” stream was attended; or vice versa). Subjects repeated this training for four sessions across four weeks. During the last session, compared to the first, subjects exhibited strengthened alpha oscillation in the right parietal cortex while they attended right and ignored left, indicating that spatial inhibitory processing to suppress sounds left was enhanced. The temporal cortex exhibited greater attentional modulation of beta oscillation after the four weeks of training, indicating enhanced neural activity to predict the target. The strength of attentional modulation on cortical evoked responses to sounds was also improved. These results prove that neurofeedback training effectively enhances the cortical processing for auditory selective attention.