College of Science, Utah State University, Logan, USA.
Department of Computer Science, University of Fairleigh Dickinson, Vancouver Campus, Vancouver, Canada.
Sci Rep. 2024 Apr 17;14(1):8861. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-58886-y.
Attention as a cognition ability plays a crucial role in perception which helps humans to concentrate on specific objects of the environment while discarding others. In this paper, auditory attention detection (AAD) is investigated using different dynamic features extracted from multichannel electroencephalography (EEG) signals when listeners attend to a target speaker in the presence of a competing talker. To this aim, microstate and recurrence quantification analysis are utilized to extract different types of features that reflect changes in the brain state during cognitive tasks. Then, an optimized feature set is determined by employing the processes of significant feature selection based on classification performance. The classifier model is developed by hybrid sequential learning that employs Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into a unified framework for accurate attention detection. The proposed AAD method shows that the selected feature set achieves the most discriminative features for the classification process. Also, it yields the best performance as compared with state-of-the-art AAD approaches from the literature in terms of various measures. The current study is the first to validate the use of microstate and recurrence quantification parameters to differentiate auditory attention using reinforcement learning without access to stimuli.
注意作为一种认知能力,在感知中起着至关重要的作用,它帮助人类专注于环境中的特定对象,同时忽略其他对象。本文利用多通道脑电图(EEG)信号中提取的不同动态特征,研究了听觉注意力检测(AAD),当听众在存在竞争说话者的情况下专注于目标说话者时。为此,利用微状态和递归量化分析来提取不同类型的特征,反映认知任务期间大脑状态的变化。然后,通过基于分类性能的显著特征选择过程确定优化的特征集。分类器模型通过混合顺序学习开发,该学习将门控循环单元(GRU)和卷积神经网络(CNN)集成到一个统一的框架中,以实现准确的注意力检测。所提出的 AAD 方法表明,所选特征集在分类过程中实现了最具区分性的特征。此外,与文献中最先进的 AAD 方法相比,它在各种指标方面都表现出了最佳性能。本研究首次验证了在没有刺激的情况下使用强化学习利用微状态和递归量化参数来区分听觉注意力的有效性。