Keywords
•
Selective auditory attention
•
Electroencephalography(EEG)
•
Neural decoding
•
Auditory attention detection(AAD)
•
Topic familiarity
•
Listening volatility
Highlights
•
The effect of unfamiliar topics and volatile listening on attention was probed.
•
Topic familiarity had a minimal effect on the cortical tracking of attended speech.
•
Topics seemed to be less useful when sufficient bottom-up information was available.
•
Volatile listening was formed by dynamic and irregular changes in auditory scenes.
•
Volatile listening degraded attention and the neural tracking of attended speech.