Attentional Disengagement during External and Internal Distractions Reduces Neural Speech Tracking in Background Noise

Abstract 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 in human participants of either sex, 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 enhanced early neural responses (