Sound Processing Hierarchy within Human Auditory Cortex

Okamoto, Hidehiko; Stracke, Henning; Bermudez, Patrick; Pantev, Christo

doi:10.1162/jocn.2010.21521

Cited by 50 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Frontal cir-cuitry, by contrast, is thought to support more flexible learning on the basis of updated predictions, including those involved in reversals (9,25,47). We note also that the auditory P2m and the N1m (plus EEG analogs of these components) have been associated in the past with modulation by cognitive factors such as attention (32,48), thought to arise due to influences from frontal cortex (32), whereas the P1m is typically found to be less influenced by putatively frontal influences such as attention (33).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Plasticity of human auditory-evoked fields induced by shock conditioning and contingency reversal

Kluge

Bauer

Leff

et al. 2011

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

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We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to assess plasticity of human auditory cortex induced by classical conditioning and contingency reversal. Participants listened to random sequences of high or low tones. A first baseline phase presented these without further associations. In phase 2, one of the frequencies (CS + ) was paired with shock on half its occurrences, whereas the other frequency (CS − ) was not. In phase 3, the contingency assigning CS + and CS − was reversed. Conditioned pupil dilation was observed in phase 2 but extinguished in phase 3. MEG revealed that, during phase-2 initial conditioning, the P1m, N1m, and P2m auditory components, measured from sensors over auditory temporal cortex, came to distinguish between CS + and CS − . After contingency reversal in phase 3, the later P2m component rapidly reversed its selectivity (unlike the pupil response) but the earlier P1m did not, whereas N1m showed some new learning but not reversal. These results confirm plasticity of human auditory responses due to classical conditioning, but go further in revealing distinct constraints on different levels of the auditory hierarchy. The later P2m component can reverse affiliation immediately in accord with an updated expectancy after contingency reversal, whereas the earlier auditory components cannot. These findings indicate distinct cognitive and emotional influences on auditory processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Plasticity of human auditory-evoked fields induced by shock conditioning and contingency reversal

Kluge

Bauer

Leff

et al. 2011

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

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“…MEG studies have shown that selectively listening to sound embedded in a complex auditory scene modulates longer latency (∼100-250 ms) responses in association auditory cortex but not the shorter latency (∼50 ms) steady-state response in core auditory cortex (21,34,35), as is also the case for MEG/EEG responses to transient sounds (13,(36)(37)(38). PET studies also indicate that the areas posterior to core auditory cortex are more activated when speech is interfered by temporally modulated noise than stationary noise (39,40), because modulated noise contains speech-like features and requires additional processes of information selection.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence of neural encoding of auditory objects while listening to competing speakers

Ding¹,

Simon

2012

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

738

107

848

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A visual scene is perceived in terms of visual objects. Similar ideas have been proposed for the analogous case of auditory scene analysis, although their hypothesized neural underpinnings have not yet been established. Here, we address this question by recording from subjects selectively listening to one of two competing speakers, either of different or the same sex, using magnetoencephalography. Individual neural representations are seen for the speech of the two speakers, with each being selectively phase locked to the rhythm of the corresponding speech stream and from which can be exclusively reconstructed the temporal envelope of that speech stream. The neural representation of the attended speech dominates responses (with latency near 100 ms) in posterior auditory cortex. Furthermore, when the intensity of the attended and background speakers is separately varied over an 8-dB range, the neural representation of the attended speech adapts only to the intensity of that speaker but not to the intensity of the background speaker, suggesting an object-level intensity gain control. In summary, these results indicate that concurrent auditory objects, even if spectrotemporally overlapping and not resolvable at the auditory periphery, are neurally encoded individually in auditory cortex and emerge as fundamental representational units for topdown attentional modulation and bottom-up neural adaptation.spectrotemporal response function | reverse correlation | phase locking | selective attention I n a complex auditory scene, humans and other animal species can perceptually detect and recognize individual auditory objects (i.e., the sound arising from a single source), even if strongly overlapping acoustically with sounds from other sources. To accomplish this remarkably difficult task, it has been hypothesized that the auditory system first decomposes the complex auditory scene into separate acoustic features and then binds the features, as appropriate, into auditory objects (1-4). The neural representations of auditory objects, each the collective representation of all the features belonging to the same auditory object, have been hypothesized to emerge in auditory cortex to become fundamental units for high-level cognitive processing (5-7). The process of parsing an auditory scene into auditory objects is computationally complex and cannot as yet be emulated by computer algorithms (8), but it occurs reliably, and often effortlessly, in the human auditory system. For example, in the classic "cocktail party problem," where multiple speakers are talking at the same time (9), human listeners can selectively attend to a chosen target speaker, even if the competing speakers are acoustically more salient (e.g., louder) or perceptually very similar (such as of the same sex) (10).To demonstrate an object-based neural representation that could subserve the robust perception of an auditory object, several key pieces of evidence are needed. The first is to demonstrate neural activity that exclusively represents a single auditory...

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“…Source locations and orientations (one dipole for each hemisphere) were estimated for each subject and each run (preconditioning/postconditioning) individually. The estimated sources were fixed in location and orientation and served as a spatial filter during the calculation of the source strength for each affective condition (Okamoto et al, 2011). We calculated a repeated-measures ANOVA on the source strengths for each condition, using the factors session, valence, and hemisphere in the N1m time interval.…”

Section: Ermf Recordings and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion-Associated Tones Attract Enhanced Attention at Early Auditory Processing: Magnetoencephalographic Correlates

Bröckelmann¹,

Steinberg²,

Elling³

et al. 2011

J. Neurosci.

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Emotionally significant objects and events in our environment attract attention based on their motivational relevance for survival. Such kind of emotional attention is thought to lead to affect-specific amplified processing that closely resembles effects of directed attention. Although there has been extensive research on prioritized processing of visual emotional stimuli, the spatio-temporal dynamics of motivated attention mechanisms in auditory processing are less clearly understood. We investigated modulatory effects of emotional attention at early auditory processing stages using time-sensitive whole-head magnetoencephalography. A novel associative learning procedure involving multiple conditioned stimuli (CSs) per affective category was introduced to specifically test whether affect-specific modulation can proceed in a rapid and highly differentiating fashion in humans. Auditory evoked fields (AEFs) were recorded in response to 42 different ultrashort, click-like sounds before and after affective conditioning with pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral auditory scenes. As hypothesized, emotional attention affected neural click tone processing at time intervals of the P20-50m (20 -50 ms) and the N1m (100 -130 ms), two early AEF components sensitive to directed selective attention (Woldorff et al., 1993). Distributed source localization revealed amplified processing of tones associated with aversive or pleasant compared with neutral auditory scenes at auditory sensory, frontal and parietal cortex regions. Behavioral tests did not indicate any awareness for the contingent CS-UCS (unconditioned stimulus) relationships in the participants, suggesting affective associative learning in absence of contingency awareness. Our findings imply early and highly differentiating affect-specific modulation of auditory stimulus processing supported by neural mechanisms and circuitry comparable with those reported for directed auditory attention.

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Sound Processing Hierarchy within Human Auditory Cortex

Cited by 50 publications

References 53 publications

Plasticity of human auditory-evoked fields induced by shock conditioning and contingency reversal

Plasticity of human auditory-evoked fields induced by shock conditioning and contingency reversal

Emergence of neural encoding of auditory objects while listening to competing speakers

Emotion-Associated Tones Attract Enhanced Attention at Early Auditory Processing: Magnetoencephalographic Correlates

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