Rate-Distortion Under Neural Tracking of Speech: A Directed Redundancy Approach

The data acquired at different scalp EEG electrodes when human subjects are exposed to speech stimuli are highly redundant. The redundancy is partly due to volume conduction effects and partly due to localized regions of the brain synchronizing their activity in response to the stimuli. In a competing talker scenario, we use a recent measure of directed redundancy to assess the amount of redundant information that is causally conveyed from the attended stimuli to the left temporal region of the brain. We observe that for the attended stimuli, the transfer entropy as well as the directed redundancy is proportional to the correlation between the speech stimuli and the reconstructed signal from the EEG signals. This demonstrates that both the rate as well as the rate-redundancy are inversely proportional to the distortion in neural speech tracking. Thus, a greater rate indicates a greater redundancy between the electrode signals, and a greater correlation between the reconstructed signal and the attended stimuli. A similar relationship is not observed for the distracting stimuli.