Schedule of Events | Symposia

Dynamic Attenuation of Task-Irrelevant Auditory Processing During Numerical Tasks

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Artturi Ylinen¹ (artturi.ylinen@helsinki.fi), Patrik Wikman¹, Jake McMullen², Erno Lehtinen^2,3, Minna Hannula-Sormunen², Kimmo Alho^1,4; ¹University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, ²University of Turku, Turku, Finland, ³Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, ⁴Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Aalto NeuroImaging, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

In everyday life, cognitive tasks are often performed amid various auditory distractions, making the suppression of task-irrelevant auditory processing an important cognitive control mechanism. In this fMRI study, we investigated neural activations related to task-irrelevant meaningful speech, as participants (n=208, age range 12-14) performed three numerical tasks of varying difficulty: solving arithmetic equations, a more demanding task where equations are created to add up to a given target answer, and an easy control task requiring no calculation. The tasks were factorially combined with meaningful speech and noise-vocoded unintelligible speech as auditory distractors. The data were analyzed with 2×2 repeated-measures ANOVAs performed separately for each task pair. The analyses focused most importantly on interactions between task and auditory distractor type. Results were corrected using permutation inference (cluster-defining threshold p=10^-5, cluster-wise p<0.01, 10000 permutations). Our results replicate earlier findings showing that task-irrelevant speech processing in the auditory regions is attenuated as task demands increase. We also extend previous findings by showing that in bilateral prefrontal and parietal regions, the effects of auditory stimulus type differed by task: as task demands increased, activity during the meaningful speech distractor increased more than activity during the noise-vocoded distractor. This suggests that these control networks may participate in controlling task-irrelevant auditory processing during more demanding tasks. In all, our findings underscore the dynamic nature of the control of task-irrelevant auditory processing, as it is influenced by both task characteristics and the type of auditory stimulus. Further analyses will examine individual variability in these mechanisms.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory