ArticleeLife2016
Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party.
Article in eLife, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Association Between the Processing of Binaural Temporal-Fine-Structure Information and Audiometric Threshold and Age: A Meta-Analysis.Trends in hearingPooled it
- Differential Cognitive Strategies for Speech-in-Noise Perception: A Comparative Study Between Yoga Practitioners and Non-practitioners.Annals of neurosciences · 2026Article
- Reduced neural speech tracking in adolescents with listening difficulty.Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Personalized and gamified auditory-cognitive training improves naturalistic speech-in-noise comprehension in older adults with hearing loss.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Attention, musicality, and familiarity shape cortical speech tracking at the musical cocktail party.Brain and language · 2025Article
- Age-Related Decline in Neural Phase-Locking to Envelope and Temporal Fine Structure Revealed by Frequency Following Responses: A Potential Signature of Cochlear Synaptopathy Impairing Speech Intelligibility.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2025Article
- Article
- Different Attention Domains and Speech-in-Noise Performance: A Preliminary Study.Journal of the American Academy of Audiology · 2025Article
- Predicting speech-in-noise ability with static and dynamic auditory figure-ground analysis using structural equation modelling.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The interplay of uncertainty, relevance and learning influences auditory categorization.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Behavioral characterization of the cochlear amplifier lesion due to loss of function of stereocilin (STRC) in human subjects.Hearing research · 2023Article
- Simultaneous relative cue reliance in speech-on-speech masking.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
- Energetic and informational masking place dissociable demands on listening effort: Evidence from simultaneous electroencephalography and pupillometrya).The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
- Avoidance-motivational intensity modulated the effect of negative emotion on working memory.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Cortical speech tracking is related to individual prediction tendencies.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Strength of target source segregation cues affects the outcome of speech-on-speech masking experiments.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023Article
- Molecular analysis of individual differences in talker search at the cocktail-party.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2022Article
- Article
- Relations between speech-reception, psychophysical temporal processing, and subcortical electrophysiological measures of auditory function in humans.Hearing research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine structure. Working memory span, age, and audiometric thresholds showed no significant association with speech understanding. These results suggest that a reduced ability to focus attention on a target is one reason why some listeners with normal hearing sensitivity have difficulty communicating in situations with background noise.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.