Papers for

brain computer interface engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Stimulus driven sound priority revealed by EEG improves auditory selection prediction

A High-Density EEG Dataset for Stimulus-Driven Auditory Attention

Abstract: Stimulus-driven auditory attention determines which sound gains priority when multiple sources compete without an explicit listening goal, yet most computational studies focus either on acoustic salience or on decoding predefined attended targets. This study investigates instruction-free auditory competition using the Stimulus-driven Auditory Attention (SAAD) paradigm and develops a neurophysiologically informed framework that integrates stimulus-derived sound priority with trial-specific EEG evidence. Behavioral analysis using a Bradley--Terry model showed that sound priority estimated from previous competitions generalized to unseen sound pairings, improving held-out prediction from an AUC of 0.577 to 0.718. EEG analysis further revealed mid-to-late centro-temporal lateralization associated with the reported selection side, with neural information remaining predictive beyond acoustic asymmetry. Guided by these findings, the proposed model first estimates a latent priority for each competing sound and forms relative stimulus evidence from their difference. A multi-scale EEG pathway with complementary signed and power-based readouts then extracts trial-specific neural evidence, which is incorporated through gated decision-level integration. The framework is evaluated using mirror-constrained and pairing-held-out protocols, together with representative acoustic, EEG, multimodal baselines, and systematic ablations. The results support a computational account in which spontaneous auditory selection reflects the interaction between generalizable stimulus priority and trial-specific neural variability.

Thu 1 OctDatabases
The gist
When many sounds compete for attention, it’s hard to know which one we will focus on if we aren’t told what to listen for. The authors studied this by letting sounds compete without instructions and measuring brain signals with EEG. They found that the priority of sounds based on past experiences helps predict which sound will be chosen next. Brain activity patterns also showed which side was selected beyond just the physical sound differences. Their combined model uses sound priority and brain signals to better understand spontaneous listening choices.
Open → 2610.01303v1