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Active Task Engagement Enhances Auditory Brain-Behaviour Prediction From Single-Trial EEG Compared With Passive
Zhaonan Ma1,2, Xiaoyu Wang3,4, Xiao Yang1
1School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.
The European Journal of Neuroscience
|February 20, 2026
Summary
Active listening tasks improve auditory neural processing prediction of behavior compared to passive listening. Task engagement enhances neural discriminability, offering better insights into individual performance differences.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
Background:
- Auditory neural processing differs between active engagement and passive listening.
- Understanding which context better predicts behavioral performance is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare the predictive power of neural measures from active versus passive auditory tasks on individual behavioral performance.
- To investigate how task engagement influences neural discriminability and its relation to behavior.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a multi-feature auditory paradigm with passive and active discrimination conditions.
- Recorded EEG from 47 participants, analyzing mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3b components.
- Employed EEGNet for single-trial neural discriminability quantification and calculated behavioral efficiency scores (ES).
Main Results:
- Active discrimination yielded higher neural discriminability, significantly separating high- and low-performance groups.
- Decoding accuracy from active listening robustly predicted behavioral efficiency (r=0.53, p<0.01).
- Passive listening showed lower discriminability and minimal group separation.
Conclusions:
- Task engagement amplifies the behavioral relevance of neural discriminability in auditory processing.
- Active auditory tasks provide stronger brain-behavior prediction than passive listening.
- Single-trial neural discriminability is a more reliable predictor of performance under active task conditions.
