Attentional Disengagement during External and Internal Distractions Reduces Neural Speech Tracking in Background Noise

Abstract Within-situation disengagement – the mental withdrawal during conversations in acoustically challenging environments – is a common experience of older people with hearing difficulties. Yet, most research on the neural mechanisms of attentional disengagement from speech listening has focused on the distraction by one competing speaker, whereas within-situation disengagement is often characterized by distraction towards external visual stimuli or internal thoughts and occurs in situations with ambient, multi-talker background masking. Across three electroencephalography (EEG) experiments in human participants of either sex, the current study examined how disengagement due to external and internal distractions affect the neural tracking of speech masked by different levels of multi-talker babble (speech in quiet, +6 dB, and −3 dB SNR). We observed enhanced early neural responses (<0.2 s) to the speech envelope for speech masked by background babble compared to speech in quiet (Experiments 1-3), suggesting stochastic facilitation. Importantly, neural tracking of the speech envelope was reduced when individuals were distracted by a visual-stimulus stream (Experiment 2) and by internal thought and imagination (Experiment 3). There were some indices suggesting the greatest disengagement-related decline in neural speech tracking occurs for the most difficult speech-masking condition, but this was not consistent across all measures. The current data show that disengagement due to external and internal distractions yield decreases in neural speech tracking, potentially suggesting converging neural pathways through which gain is downregulated in auditory cortex. These results indicate that disengagement from listening can be identified through non-invasive neural measures. Significance Many older adults with hearing difficulties mentally “tune out” during conversations in noisy environments, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this within-situation disengagement remain poorly understood. Across three electroencephalography experiments, we examined how external (visual) and internal (thought-based) distractions influence neural tracking of speech masked by multi-talker babble. We observed that attentional disengagement – whether induced by external stimuli or internal thoughts – reduced the brain’s tracking of the speech envelope. These findings demonstrate that listening disengagement can be objectively identified through neural measures and suggest a convergence in neural pathways through which both external and internal distractions down-regulate auditory gain, providing new insight into attentional control in challenging listening conditions.