The cocktail party effect describes the brain’s natural ability to attend to a specific voice or audio source in a crowded room. Researchers have recently attempted to recreate this ability in hearing aid design using brain signals from invasive electrocorticography electrodes. The present study aims to find neural signatures of auditory attention to achieve this same goal with noninvasive electroencephalographic (EEG) methods. Five human participants participated in an auditory attention task. Participants listened to a series of four syllables followed by a fifth syllable (probe syllable). Participants were instructed to indicate whether or not the probe syllable was one of the four syllables played immediately before the probe syllable. Trials of this task were separated into conditions of playing the syllables in silence (Signal) and in background noise (Signal With Noise), and both behavioral and EEG data were recorded. EEG signals were analyzed with event-related potential and time-frequency analysis methods. The behavioral data indicated that participants performed better on the task during the “Signal” condition, which aligns with the challenges demonstrated in the cocktail party effect. The EEG analysis showed that the alpha band’s (9-13 Hz) inter-trial coherence could potentially indicate characteristics of the attended speech signal. These preliminary results suggest that EEG time-frequency analysis has the potential to reveal the neural signatures of auditory attention, which may allow for the design of a noninvasive, EEG-based hearing aid.

With millions of people living with a disease as restraining as migraines, there are no ways to diagnose them before they occur. In this study, a migraine model using nitroglycerin is used in rats to study the awake brain activity during the migraine state. In an attempt to search for a biomarker for the migraine state, we found multiple deviations in EEG brain activity across different bands. Firstly, there was a clear decrease in power in the delta, beta, alpha, and theta bands. A slight increase in power in the gamma and high frequency bands was also found, which is consistent with other pain-related studies12. Additionally, we searched for a decreased pain threshold in this deviation, in which we concluded that more data analysis is needed to eliminate the multiple potential noise influxes throughout each dataset. However, with this study we did find a clear change in brain activity, but a more detailed analysis will narrow down what this change could mean and how it impacts the migraine state.