Journal article
Task-Modulated Cortical Representations of Natural Sound Source Categories
Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark1
Hearing Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark2
Princeton University3
Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark4
Cognitive Systems, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark5
Copenhagen University Hospital Herlev and Gentofte6
In everyday sound environments, we recognize sound sources and events by attending to relevant aspects of an acoustic input. Evidence about the cortical mechanisms involved in extracting relevant category information from natural sounds is, however, limited to speech. Here, we used functional MRI to measure cortical response patterns while human listeners categorized real-world sounds created by objects of different solid materials (glass, metal, wood) manipulated by different sound-producing actions (striking, rattling, dropping).
In different sessions, subjects had to identify either material or action categories in the same sound stimuli. The sound-producing action and the material of the sound source could be decoded from multivoxel activity patterns in auditory cortex, including Heschl’s gyrus and planum temporale. Importantly, decoding success depended on task relevance and category discriminability.
Action categories were more accurately decoded in auditory cortex when subjects identified action information. Conversely, the material of the same sound sources was decoded with higher accuracy in the inferior frontal cortex during material identification. Representational similarity analyses indicated that both early and higher-order auditory cortex selectively enhanced spectrotemporal features relevant to the target category.
Together, the results indicate a cortical selection mechanism that favors task-relevant information in the processing of nonvocal sound categories.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Year: | 2018 |
Pages: | 295-306 |
ISSN: | 14602199 and 10473211 |
Types: | Journal article |
DOI: | 10.1093/cercor/bhx263 |
ORCIDs: | Hjortkjær, Jens and Madsen, Kristoffer Hougaard |
Acoustic Stimulation Acoustic Stimulation/methods Adult Attention Attention/physiology Auditory Perception Auditory Perception/physiology Brain Mapping Cerebral Cortex Cerebral Cortex/diagnostic imaging Cerebrovascular Circulation Cerebrovascular Circulation/physiology Female Humans Magnetic Resonance Imaging Male Neuropsychological Tests Oxygen Oxygen/blood Young Adult auditory cortex category-based attention fMRI natural sounds object categorization