Fig. 1: The single-trial design for modulating selective attention to speech.

The task contained trials of short 5-word sentences of natural speech. Participants’ attention was modulated within and across modalities. a In Condition 1, a rotating Gabor patch was attended in the visual modality, while speech served as a distractor (dark purple). b This was reversed in Condition 2, where speech was the focus of attention (bright purple). c In Condition 3, another speaker of the opposite sex was added to investigate the ocular speech tracking of a target speaker (red) with a simultaneously presented distractor (yellow). After each trial, participants responded to questions on the screen with a handheld button box (left button = green, right button = red): to the Gabor rotations in Condition 1 and to the presented words in the target speaker in Conditions 2 and 3.