Search results for "auditory cortex"
showing 10 items of 85 documents
Musical expertise modulates functional connectivity of limbic regions during continuous music listening.
2015
Music is known to be an important facet of all human cultures (Merriam, 1964). Listening to music in order to influence moods, evoke strong emotions, and derive pleasure is becoming increasingly common, especially in this day and age when access to music is easy and quick. In recent years, exploring the neural correlates of musical emotions has attracted the attention of neuroscientists (Brattico & Pearce, 2013; Koelsch, Fritz, v. Cramon, Muller, & Friederici, 2006). However, the majority of these studies have not accounted for the effect of musical expertise, despite increasing evidence of structural and functional differences between musicians and nonmusicians, particularly in the regions…
Promises of formal and informal musical activities in advancing neurocognitive development throughout childhood
2015
Adult musicians show superior neural sound discrimination when compared to nonmusicians. However, it is unclear whether these group differences reflect the effects of experience or preexisting neural enhancement in individuals who seek out musical training. Tracking how brain function matures over time in musically trained and nontrained children can shed light on this issue. Here, we review our recent longitudinal event-related potential (ERP) studies that examine how formal musical training and less formal musical activities influence the maturation of brain responses related to sound discrimination and auditory attention. These studies found that musically trained school-aged children an…
Connectivity patterns during music listening: Evidence for action-based processing in musicians
2017
Musical expertise is visible both in the morphology and functionality of the brain. Recent research indicates that functional integration between multi-sensory, somato-motor, default-mode (DMN), and salience (SN) networks of the brain differentiates musicians from non-musicians during resting state. Here, we aimed at determining whether brain networks differentially exchange information in musicians as opposed to non-musicians during naturalistic music listening. Whole-brain graph-theory analyses were performed on participants' fMRI responses. Group-level differences revealed that musicians' primary hubs comprised cerebral and cerebellar sensorimotor regions whereas non-musicians' dominant …
A Basis Set of Elementary Operations Captures Recombination of Neocortical Cell Assemblies During Basal Conditions and Learning
2019
Cell assemblies — subgroups within neuronal networks — are believed to serve as functional entities underlying cognitive capabilities such as categorical perception or memory formation and storage. However, little is known about their long-term dynamics. Using chronic in vivo calcium imaging in the mouse auditory cortex, we find that cell assemblies undergo continuous recombination, even under behaviorally stable conditions. We identify a basis set of elementary operations capturing the dynamics of cell assemblies, which involve plasticity of both the stimulus tuning of particular assemblies as well as the cellular composition of an assembly. Auditory fear conditioning introduces biases in …
Auditory cortical and hippocampal-system mismatch responses to duration deviants in urethane-anesthetized rats.
2013
Any change in the invariant aspects of the auditory environment is of potential importance. The human brain preattentively or automatically detects such changes. The mismatch negativity (MMN) of event-related potentials (ERPs) reflects this initial stage of auditory change detection. The origin of MMN is held to be cortical. The hippocampus is associated with a later generated P3a of ERPs reflecting involuntarily attention switches towards auditory changes that are high in magnitude. The evidence for this cortico-hippocampal dichotomy is scarce, however. To shed further light on this issue, auditory cortical and hippocampal-system (CA1, dentate gyrus, subiculum) local-field potentials were …
Rapid categorization of sound objects in anesthetized rats as indexed by the electrophysiological mismatch response
2014
It is not known whether animals can, similarly to humans, categorize auditory objects based on an abstract rule in combining their physical features. We recorded local-field potentials from the dura above the primary auditory cortex in urethane-anesthetized rats presented with sound series occasionally violating a rule (e.g., "the higher the frequency, the weaker the intensity"). In a separate control condition, the same frequency and intensity levels were applied in the sound objects, but they obeyed no rule. Responses found selectively to the violations of the rule suggest that an abstract rule was represented in the rat brain, enabling auditory categorization.
How functional coupling between the auditory cortex and the amygdala induces musical emotion: a single case study.
2013
Music is a sound structure of remarkable acoustical and temporal complexity. Although it cannot denote specific meaning, it is one of the most potent and universal stimuli for inducing mood. How the auditory and limbic systems interact, and whether this interaction is lateralized when feeling emotions related to music, remains unclear. We studied the functional correlation between the auditory cortex (AC) and amygdala (AMY) through intracerebral recordings from both hemispheres in a single patient while she listened attentively to musical excerpts, which we compared to passive listening of a sequence of pure tones. While the left primary and secondary auditory cortices (PAC and SAC) showed …
Musical training facilitates the neural discrimination of major versus minor chords in 13-year-old children
2012
Music practice since childhood affects the development of hearing skills. An important classification in Western music is the chords’ major-minor dichotomy. Its preattentive auditory discrimination was studied here using a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm in 13-year-olds with active hobbies, music-related (music group) or other (control group). In a context of root major chords, root minor chords and inverted major chords were presented infrequently. The interval structure of inverted majors differs more from root majors than the interval structure of root minors. However, the identity of the chords is the same in inverted and root majors (major), but different in root minors. The deviant…
The Argument Dependency Model
2015
This chapter summarizes the architecture of the extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM), a model of language comprehension that aspires toward neurobiological plausibility. It combines design principles from neurobiology with insights on cross-linguistic diversity. Like other current models, the eADM posits that auditory language processing proceeds along two distinct streams in the brain emanating from auditory cortex: the antero-ventral and postero-dorsal streams. Both streams are organized hierarchically and information processing takes place in a cascaded fashion. Each stream has functionally unified computational properties congruent with its role in primate audition. While the dorsa…
Hand Gestures Alert Auditory Cortices
2017
When acquiring a foreign language, the first challenge is to break into the speech stream to identify basic linguistic units. The present study tested the hypothesis that hand gestures facilitate this process by alerting auditory cortices to attend to and identify meaningful phonemic information. During fMRI data acquisition, participants watched videos of an actor speaking in Russian under three conditions. Sentences were produced with just speech alone or were accompanied by two types of hand gestures: 1) metaphoric gesture and 2) free gesture. The main finding was that there was increased auditory cortex activation when both types of gestures accompanied speech compared to speech alone, …