ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

Overestimated performance of auditory attention decoding caused by experimental design in EEG recordings

Yujie Yan, Xiran Xu, Haolin Zhu, Songyi Li, Bo Wang, Xihong Wu, Jing Chen

Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) identifies a listener's focus in complex auditory scenes based on cortical neural responses. High decoding performance using DNN-based methods has been achieved with public EEG datasets. However, performance may be overestimated as models might learn temporal-autocorrelation features rather than auditory attention-related features. While data splitting risks have been discussed, experimental design risks have not. In this work, we collected a non-block design (NBD) scalp-EEG and ear-EEG joint dataset and compared it to previous block design (BD) datasets using DNN-based models. Results show a significant accuracy drop from BD to NBD dataset, while a linear stimulus reconstruction model remains robust. Inter-trial phase coherence analysis confirms stronger neural phase-locking to attended speech in BD dataset. These findings suggest BD enhances coherence of neural response but risks overestimating AAD accuracy. Code and data are released.