A Brain System for Auditory Working Memory

Abstract

The brain basis for auditory working memory, the process of actively maintaining sounds in memory over short periods of time, is controversial. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in human participants, we demonstrate that the maintenance of single tones in memory is associated with activation in auditory cortex. In addition, sustained activation was observed in hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus. Multivoxel pattern analysis showed that patterns of activity in auditory cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus distinguished the tone that was maintained in memory. Functional connectivity during maintenance was demonstrated between auditory cortex and both the hippocampus and inferior frontal cortex. The data support a system for auditory working memory based on the maintenance of sound-specific representations in auditory cortex by projections from higher-order areas, including the hippocampus and frontal cortex.

Language in Context: MEG Evidence for Modality-General and -Specific Responses to Reference Resolution

“…This analogy suggests the alternative possibility that the medial parietal lobe is involved merely in recalling the spatiotemporal properties of the referents. Although our design by itself cannot exclude this possibility, it is rendered less plausible when considering other research: short-term memory tasks for visual features tend to engage lateral rather than medial parietal regions (Todd and Marois, 2004; Kawasaki et al, 2008; Bettencourt and Xu, 2015), nor do auditory short-term memory tasks tend to engage the medial parietal lobe (Kumar et al, 2016). On the other hand, medial parietal regions are recruited by tasks that involve judgments of complex spatial or temporal relations (Galati et al, 2010; Kwok and Macaluso, 2015), which is more consistent with an involvement in relational models as argued above.…”

Functional neuroanatomy of speech signal decoding in primary progressive aphasias

“…This interpretation also accords with the differential activation profiles shown by the present patient groups on the relevant phonemic contrast: compared with healthy controls, the nfvPPA and svPPA groups showed relatively normal activation profiles, whereas the lvPPA group exhibited a significantly attenuated response to natural phonemes in the key superior temporal region, in line with the clinical deficits of phonological processing (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2008, Grube et al., 2016, Hailstone et al., 2012, Hardy et al., 2015, Henry et al., 2016, Rohrer et al., 2010) and related deficits of paralinguistic analysis (Rohrer et al., 2012) previously documented in lvPPA. Although we did not assess working memory directly in this experiment, posterior superior temporal cortex has been shown to play an integral role in auditory working memory for phonemes as well as other auditory objects (Kumar et al., 2016, Markiewicz and Bohland, 2016), suggesting that the profile identified here is relevant to the phonological working memory impairment that is a defining feature of lvPPA (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2008, Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). Clinically, phonological deficits are a feature of nfvPPA as well as lvPPA (Hailstone et al., 2012, Hardy et al., 2015, Henry et al., 2016, Rohrer et al., 2010): the present findings suggest that these deficits may have different mechanisms in the 2 syndromes, since the relevant experimental contrast isolated a stage of phonological object representation that is likely to be core to lvPPA rather than nfvPPA (Rohrer et al., 2010).…”

Specialized neural dynamics for verbal and tonal memory: fMRI evidence in congenital amusia

“…When investigating the neural correlates of tonal (pitch) memory, activations involving the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the DLPFC and the insular cortex, along with the planum temporale, the intra parietal sulcus (IPS), the hippocampus, the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and cerebellum have been reported (Albouy et al, ; Albouy, Mattout, Sanchez, Tillmann, & Caclin, ; Albouy, Weiss, Baillet, & Zatorre, ; Foster, Halpern, & Zatorre, ; Foster & Zatorre, ; Gaab, Gaser, Zaehle, Jancke, & Schlaug, ; Griffiths, Johnsrude, Dean, & Green, ; Holcomb et al, ; Kumar et al, ; Zatorre, Evans, & Meyer, ). While the brain regions involved in pitch memory are highly comparable to brain regions recruited for the maintenance of verbal information, several of these findings reveal more strongly right‐lateralized activations and thus suggest a potential specialization of each hemisphere for different materials (Caclin & Tillmann, ; Peretz & Zatorre, ; Samson & Zatorre, ).…”