Temporal selectivity declines in the aging human auditory cortex

Abstract

<jats:p>Current models successfully describe the auditory cortical response to natural sounds with a set of spectro-temporal features. However, these models have hardly been linked to the ill-understood neurobiological changes that occur in the aging auditory cortex. Modelling the hemodynamic response to a rich natural sound mixture in N=64 listeners of varying age, we here show that in older listeners' auditory cortex, the key feature of temporal rate is represented with a markedly broader tuning. This loss of temporal selectivity is most prominent in primary auditory cortex and planum temporale, with no such changes in adjacent auditory or other brain areas. Amongst older listeners, we observe a direct relationship between chronological age and temporal-rate tuning, unconfounded by auditory acuity or model goodness of fit. In line with senescent neural dedifferentiation more generally, our results highlight decreased selectivity to temporal information as a hallmark of the aging auditory cortex.</jats:p>

Predicting speech from a cortical hierarchy of event-based time scales

“…Thirty-four participants listened to a 1-hour narrated story while their hemodynamic brain responses were recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To emulate a challenging listening scenario, we presented the story against a competing stream of resynthesized natural sounds [for an analysis focusing on cortical representations of acoustics, see ( 48 )].…”

“…The order in which sound textures were arranged was randomized across participants. For more details on how sound textures in the present experiment were generated and how they were processed in auditory cortex, see ( 48 ).…”

“…Linguistic features included information about when words were presented (coded as 1), whether they were content or function words (coded as 1 and −1), and which frequency they had. In ( 48 ), we decomposed the speech-in-noise stimuli into a 288-dimensional acoustic space of spectral, temporal, and spectrotemporal modulations, which was derived from a filter bank modeling auditory processing ( 90 ). Here, we reduced the number of acoustic features to the first nine principal components, which explained more than 80% of variance in the original acoustic space.…”

Cortical tracking of unheard formant modulations derived from silently presented lip movements and its decline with age

“…Older adults also indicate a compensatory mechanism when processing degraded speech especially in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and middle frontal gyrus (Erb & Obleser, 2013). Additionally, the temporal processing of auditory information is altered in the ageing brain, pointing to decreased selectivity for temporal modulations in primary auditory areas (Erb et al, 2020). Those studies reinforce a distinctive age-related alteration in processing auditory speech.…”

Aberrant perceptual judgements on speech-relevant acoustic features in hallucination-prone individuals

“…However, it is also possible that in hallucination-prone individuals already the general response properties of auditory cortex are altered in terms of resting state activity (for review see 14 ), ongoing neural dynamics 53 , spectral signatures 54 , or encoding of spectro-temporal modulations 55 . The current study opens a specific and promising avenue using validated auditory perceptual-filtering models 19,20,25 ; Spectro-temporal modulations currently form a core tenet of auditory neuroscience, tractable for non-human animal research (e.g., 56 ) as well as human functional neuroimaging (e.g., 22,55,57 )…”