Single-unit activity in the auditory cortex of monkeys actively localizing sound sources: Spatial tuning and behavioral dependency

Benson, D. A.; Hienz, Robert D.; Goldstein, Moïse H.

doi:10.1016/0006-8993(81)90290-0

Cited by 135 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Throughout the sample of recorded neurons, less than 5% (n ϭ 78) have shown spatial selectivity within 15°, and as yet none have been recorded with a spatial selectivity of less than 10°. These data are similar to those reported by others in monkeys performing a different, but similarly simple localization task (39) as well as in the anesthetized cat (36)(37)(38)(39)(40). Thus, the vast majority of primary auditory cortical neurons have spatial tuning selectivity greater than the 8°demonstrated to give rise to the ventriloquism aftereffect.…”

Section: Potential Cortical Substrates For the Ventriloquism Aftereffectsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…In cats, lesions restricted to the physiologically defined boundaries of AI do produce sound localization deficits (30). In spite of the involvement of auditory cortex in sound localization behavior, there is little direct evidence of how acoustic space is represented in auditory cortex (35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40). Recordings from single AI neurons in an awake macaque monkey actively localizing these sounds from my laboratory indicate that this cortical area could contribute to this effect.…”

Section: Potential Cortical Substrates For the Ventriloquism Aftereffectmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Rapidly induced auditory plasticity: The ventriloquism aftereffect

Recanzone

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

256

284

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Cortical representational plasticity has been well documented after peripheral and central injuries or improvements in perceptual and motor abilities. This has led to inferences that the changes in cortical representations parallel and account for the improvement in performance during the period of skill acquisition. There have also been several examples of rapidly induced changes in cortical neuronal response properties, for example, by intracortical microstimulation or by classical conditioning paradigms. This report describes similar rapidly induced changes in a cortically mediated perception in human subjects, the ventriloquism aftereffect, which presumably ref lects a corresponding change in the cortical representation of acoustic space. The ventriloquism aftereffect describes an enduring shift in the perception of the spatial location of acoustic stimuli after a period of exposure of spatially disparate and simultaneously presented acoustic and visual stimuli. Exposure of a mismatch of 8°for 20-30 min is sufficient to shift the perception of acoustic space by approximately the same amount across subjects and acoustic frequencies. Given that the cerebral cortex is necessary for the perception of acoustic space, it is likely that the ventriloquism aftereffect ref lects a change in the cortical representation of acoustic space. Comparisons between the responses of single cortical neurons in the behaving macaque monkey and the stimulus parameters that give rise to the ventriloquism aftereffect suggest that the changes in the cortical representation of acoustic space may begin as early as the primary auditory cortex.Studies of cerebral cortical organization have demonstrated a capacity for representational reorganization after peripheral and central lesions (1-5) and learning paradigms (6-11). Implicit in these observations is that the alterations in cortical representations form the basis of the changes in perceptual and motor abilities. The bulk of the studies to date have been dedicated to comparing the posttraining electrophysiological or functional imaging data with either the pretraining data of the same subjects or data from different, naive subjects. These studies also have largely concentrated on using training paradigms that require several sessions of performing the particular task before changes in perception are demonstrated.There also have been several descriptions of rapidly induced changes in cortical neuronal response properties, for example, by intracortical microstimulation (12-14), classical conditioning paradigms (15, 16), or by artificially induced visual scotomas (17). The ability to rapidly change cortical receptive fields suggests that there is a capacity for rapidly induced changes in cortically mediated perceptions. One such demonstration of this is the ventriloquism aftereffect (18,19), in which the perception of the location of an acoustic stimulus can be systematically altered after a period of exposure to a consistent spatial disparity between visual and auditory stimuli.T...

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Section: Potential Cortical Substrates For the Ventriloquism Aftereffectsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Potential Cortical Substrates For the Ventriloquism Aftereffectmentioning

confidence: 97%

Rapidly induced auditory plasticity: The ventriloquism aftereffect

Recanzone

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

256

284

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It was not unexpected to find neurons with a spatial receptive field within the mapping range of 60°of central frontal space: already in auditory cortex, there is a preference for stimuli located at the midline (for review, see Kaas et al, 1999). The spatial tuning of these auditory cortex neurons is often quite broad with a receptive field diameter extending commonly over 90°for a half-maximal response (Benson et al, 1981;Middlebrooks and Pettigrew, 1981;Middlebrooks et al, 1998;Furukawa et al, 2000;Recanzone et al, 2000). However, these larger receptive field sizes could have been caused by reflections in the experimental setups used in these studies.…”

Section: Auditory Receptive Fieldsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multisensory Space Representations in the Macaque Ventral Intraparietal Area

Schlack¹,

Sterbing²,

Hartung³

et al. 2005

J. Neurosci.

297

235

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Animals can use different sensory signals to localize objects in the environment. Depending on the situation, the brain either integrates information from multiple sensory sources or it chooses the modality conveying the most reliable information to direct behavior. This suggests that somehow, the brain has access to a modality-invariant representation of external space. Accordingly, neural structures encoding signals from more than one sensory modality are best suited for spatial information processing. In primates, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is a key structure for spatial representations. One substructure within human and macaque PPC is the ventral intraparietal area (VIP), known to represent visual, vestibular, and tactile signals. In the present study, we show for the first time that macaque area VIP neurons also respond to auditory stimulation. Interestingly, the strength of the responses to the acoustic stimuli greatly depended on the spatial location of the stimuli [i.e., most of the auditory responsive neurons had surprisingly small spatially restricted auditory receptive fields (RFs)].Given this finding, we compared the auditory RF locations with the respective visual RF locations of individual area VIP neurons. In the vast majority of neurons, the auditory and visual RFs largely overlapped. Additionally, neurons with well aligned visual and auditory receptive fields tended to encode multisensory space in a common reference frame. This suggests that area VIP constitutes a part of a neuronal circuit involved in the computation of a modality-invariant representation of external space.

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“…Most studies show that performance in a behavioural task increases the reliability of auditory responses (Benson et al, 1981;Pfingst et al, 1977;Ryan and Miller, 1977). Training can also have a profound effect on auditory neural responses (Miller et al, 1972).…”

Section: An Animal Model Of Listeningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Some investigations into non-passive listening

et al. 2007

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Our knowledge of the function of the auditory nervous system is based upon a wealth of data obtained, for the most part, in anaesthetised animals. More recently, it has been generally acknowledged that factors such as attention profoundly modulate the activity of sensory systems and this can take place at many levels of processing. Imaging studies, in particular, have revealed the greater activation of auditory areas and areas outside of sensory processing areas when attending to a stimulus. We present here a brief review of the consequences of such non-passive listening and go on to describe some of the experiments we are conducting to investigate them. In imaging studies, using fMRI, we can demonstrate the activation of attention networks that are non-specific to the sensory modality as well as greater and different activation of the areas of the supra-temporal plane that includes primary and secondary auditory areas. The profuse descending connections of the auditory system seem likely to be part of the mechanisms subserving attention to sound. These are generally thought to be largely inactivated by anaesthesia. However, we have been able to demonstrate that even in an anaesthetised preparation, removing the descending control from the cortex leads to quite profound changes in the temporal patterns of activation by sounds in thalamus and inferior colliculus. Some of these effects seem to be specific to the ear of stimulation and affect interaural processing. To bridge these observations we are developing an awake behaving preparation involving freely moving animals in which it will be possible to investigate the effects of consciousness (by contrasting awake and anaesthetized), passive and active listening.

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Single-unit activity in the auditory cortex of monkeys actively localizing sound sources: Spatial tuning and behavioral dependency

Cited by 135 publications

References 24 publications

Rapidly induced auditory plasticity: The ventriloquism aftereffect

Rapidly induced auditory plasticity: The ventriloquism aftereffect

Multisensory Space Representations in the Macaque Ventral Intraparietal Area

Some investigations into non-passive listening

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