Electromyographic Correlates of Effortful Listening in the Vestigial Auriculomotor System

Abstract

AbstractRecently, electromyographic (EMG) signals of auricular muscles have been shown to be an indicator of spatial auditory attention in humans, based on a vestigial pinna-orienting system. Because spatial auditory attention in a competing speaker task is closely related to the more gen-eralized concept of attentional effort in listening, the current study inves-tigated the possibility that the EMG activity of auricular muscles could also reflect correlates of effortful listening in general. Twenty subjects were recruited. EMG signals from the left and right superior and poste-rior auricular muscles (SAM, PAM) were recorded while subjects attended a target podcast in a competing speaker paradigm. Three different lev-els of listening effort, low, medium, and high, were generated by varying the number and pitch of distractor streams, as well as the signal-to-noise ratio. All audio streams were either presented from a loudspeaker placed in front of the participants (0°), or in the back (180°). Averaged PAM activity was not affected by different levels of listening effort, but was sig-nificantly larger when stimuli were presented from the back, as opposed to the front. Averaged SAM activity, however, was significantly larger in the high listening effort condition, compared to low and medium, but was not affected by stimulus direction. We hypothesize that the increased SAM activity is a response of the vestigial pinna–orienting system to effortful stream segregation task.