We used behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the effects of parametrically varied task-irrelevant pitch changes in attended sounds on loudness-discrimination performance and brain activity in cortical surface maps. Ten subjects discriminated tone loudness in sequences that also included infrequent task-irrelevant pitch changes. Consistent with results of previous studies, the task-irrelevant pitch changes impaired performance in the loudness discrimination task. Auditory stimulation, attention-enhanced processing of sounds and motor responding during the loudness discrimination task activated supratemporal (auditory cortex) and inferior parietal areas bilaterally and left-hemisphere (contralateral to the hand used for responding) motor areas. Large pitch changes were associated with right hemisphere supratemporal activations as well as widespread bilateral activations in the frontal lobe and along the intraparietal sulcus. Loudness discrimination and distracting pitch changes activated common areas in the right supratemporal gyrus, left medial frontal cortex, left precentral gyrus, and left inferior parietal cortex. Keywords auditory processing; attention; change detection; distraction; fMRI While effective cognitive performance requires focusing of attention on relevant information and ignoring irrelevant sensory inputs, one must retain the ability to respond to potentially important novel events in the environment. Previous studies have used the so-called auditory distraction paradigm [3,7,26,32] to examine the effect of task-irrelevant sound changes on behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs). In this paradigm, subjects discriminate sounds on one dimension (e.g., sound duration) while task-irrelevant changes occur in some other dimension (e.g., pitch) of the same sounds. Typically, deviant auditory stimuli produce a brief degradation of performance (reaction times increase and hit rates decrease) that is accompanied by two characteristic responses in event-related brain potentials (ERPs), the mismatch Address correspondence to: Teemu Rinne, Department of Psychology, PO Box 9, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland, Phone : +358 50 4951351, Fax : +358-9-19129401, Email: teemu.rinne@helsinki.fi. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. [19,21,24]. However, previous studies have not focused directly on mapping the brain activation underlying the behavioral distraction effect. Here, we examine in detail the cortical circuits involved in auditory change detection and distraction of focused auditory attention usi...
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