Alpha oscillatory activity reveals focused-attentional disparity between cochlear implant users and normal hearing listeners.

Overview

1. Department of Experimental Otology, Hannover Medical School (MHH) at Lower Saxony Center for Biomedical Engineering, Implant Research and Development (NIFE), Joint Research Institute of AudioNeuro Technology (VIANNA), Stadtfelddamm 34, 30625 Hannover, Germany
2. Cluster of Excellence “Hearing4all”, Oldenburg, Germany
3. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital Cologne, Cologne, Germany
4. Department of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Carl Von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

Abstract

Cochlear implants (CIs) allow hearing-impaired subjects to regain access to speech. However, the individual outcome variability remains high and unexplained. One contributing factor to the CI performance could be related to higher cognitive functions, which are not as well studied as in normal hearing (NH) populations. To study the cognitive processing in CI-users, in particular attentional processing, we compared the neural correlates of attention of a large cohort of CI-users (n = 37) to those of an age-matched group of NH-listeners (n = 37). The cognitive paradigm used here is a three-stimulus oddball paradigm in both passive and active listening conditions to isolate the attentional difference in unattended and attended task conditions. The addition of a third stimulus-type allowed us to specifically disentangling the attentional processing of task-relevant from the task-irrelevant stimuli. We expanded the previous ERP study by inspecting oscillatory activities. We localized the responsible brain areas and estimated local neural activities in three cortical regions: temporal transverse gyrus dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal lobule. We found alpha activity (8–12 Hz) to be the most relevant correlate of top-down auditory attention. The result on alpha activity suggests that CI-users may have directed their attention toward task-irrelevant stimuli, thereby impeding their focus on task-relevant stimuli. In sum, this study provides important insight into the cognitive attentional processing in CI-users; those may contribute in high listening effort and CI performance variability.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-026-52434-6.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

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Code availability

Customized Matlab scripts for EEG processing in this study are available on GitHub at: https://github.com/brllant

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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Data availability

The de-identified EEG data can be made available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author, subject to institutional and ethical approvals.

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 4 authors, 2 keywords, 13 MeSH terms, 121 references.

Cite

This paper

Brilliant, Schierholz, I., Sandmann, P., & Kral, A. (2026). Alpha oscillatory activity reveals focused-attentional disparity between cochlear implant users and normal hearing listeners. Scientific reports, 16(1), 14690. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-52434-6

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