Attentional disengagement during external and internal distractions reduces neural speech tracking in background noise

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, 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 early (<200 ms), enhanced neural responses 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 a common neural pathway through which gain is downregulated in auditory cortex. These results indicate that disengagement from listening can be identified through non-invasive neural measures.