Dataset Information

Auditory-motor synchronization varies among individuals and is critically shaped by acoustic features.

ABSTRACT: The ability to synchronize body movements with quasi-regular auditory stimuli represents a fundamental trait in humans at the core of speech and music. Despite the long trajectory of the study of such ability, little attention has been paid to how acoustic features of the stimuli and individual differences can modulate auditory-motor synchrony. Here, by exploring auditory-motor synchronization abilities across different effectors and types of stimuli, we revealed that this capability is more restricted than previously assumed. While the general population can synchronize to sequences composed of the repetitions of the same acoustic unit, the synchrony in a subgroup of participants is impaired when the unit's identity varies across the sequence. In addition, synchronization in this group can be temporarily restored by being primed by a facilitator stimulus. Auditory-motor integration is stable across effectors, supporting the hypothesis of a central clock mechanism subserving the different articulators but critically shaped by the acoustic features of the stimulus and individual abilities.

SUBMITTER: Mares C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10284880 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Auditory-motor synchronization varies among individuals and is critically shaped by acoustic features.

Mares Cecilia C Echavarría Solana Ricardo R Assaneo M Florencia MF

Communications biology 20230621 1

The ability to synchronize body movements with quasi-regular auditory stimuli represents a fundamental trait in humans at the core of speech and music. Despite the long trajectory of the study of such ability, little attention has been paid to how acoustic features of the stimuli and individual differences can modulate auditory-motor synchrony. Here, by exploring auditory-motor synchronization abilities across different effectors and types of stimuli, we revealed that this capability is more res ...[more]

PMID: 37344562

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundWhile human auditory cortex is known to contain tonotopically organized auditory cortical fields (ACFs), little is known about how processing in these fields is modulated by other acoustic features or by attention.Methodology/principal findingsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and population-based cortical surface analysis to characterize the tonotopic organization of human auditory cortex and analyze the influence of tone intensity, ear of delivery, scanner background noise, and intermodal selective attention on auditory cortex activations. Medial auditory cortex surrounding Heschl's gyrus showed large sensory (unattended) activations with two mirror-symmetric tonotopic fields similar to those observed in non-human primates. Sensory responses in medial regions had symmetrical distributions with respect to the left and right hemispheres, were enlarged for tones of increased intensity, and were enhanced when sparse image acquisition reduced scanner acoustic noise. Spatial distribution analysis suggested that changes in tone intensity shifted activation within isofrequency bands. Activations to monaural tones were enhanced over the hemisphere contralateral to stimulation, where they produced activations similar to those produced by binaural sounds. Lateral regions of auditory cortex showed small sensory responses that were larger in the right than left hemisphere, lacked tonotopic organization, and were uninfluenced by acoustic parameters. Sensory responses in both medial and lateral auditory cortex decreased in magnitude throughout stimulus blocks. Attention-related modulations (ARMs) were larger in lateral than medial regions of auditory cortex and appeared to arise primarily in belt and parabelt auditory fields. ARMs lacked tonotopic organization, were unaffected by acoustic parameters, and had distributions that were distinct from those of sensory responses. Unlike the gradual adaptation seen for sensory responses, ARMs increased in amplitude throughout stimulus blocks.Conclusions/significanceThe results are consistent with the view that medial regions of human auditory cortex contain tonotopically organized core and belt fields that map the basic acoustic features of sounds while surrounding higher-order parabelt regions are tuned to more abstract stimulus attributes. Intermodal selective attention enhances processing in neuronal populations that are partially distinct from those activated by unattended stimuli.

Project description:Computation in neuronal assemblies is putatively reflected in the excitatory and inhibitory cycles of activation distributed throughout the brain. In speech and language processing, coordination of these cycles resulting in phase synchronization has been argued to reflect the integration of information on different timescales (e.g. segmenting acoustics signals to phonemic and syllabic representations; (Giraud and Poeppel 2012 Nat. Neurosci. 15, 511 (doi:10.1038/nn.3063)). A natural extension of this claim is that phase synchronization functions similarly to support the inference of more abstract higher-level linguistic structures (Martin 2016 Front. Psychol. 7, 120; Martin and Doumas 2017 PLoS Biol. 15, e2000663 (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2000663); Martin and Doumas. 2019 Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 29, 77-83 (doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2019.04.008)). Hale et al. (Hale et al. 2018 Finding syntax in human encephalography with beam search. arXiv 1806.04127 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04127)) showed that syntactically driven parsing decisions predict electroencephalography (EEG) responses in the time domain; here we ask whether phase synchronization in the form of either inter-trial phrase coherence or cross-frequency coupling (CFC) between high-frequency (i.e. gamma) bursts and lower-frequency carrier signals (i.e. delta, theta), changes as the linguistic structures of compositional meaning (viz., bracket completions, as denoted by the onset of words that complete phrases) accrue. We use a naturalistic story-listening EEG dataset from Hale et al. to assess the relationship between linguistic structure and phase alignment. We observe increased phase synchronization as a function of phrase counts in the delta, theta, and gamma bands, especially for function words. A more complex pattern emerged for CFC as phrase count changed, possibly related to the lack of a one-to-one mapping between 'size' of linguistic structure and frequency band-an assumption that is tacit in recent frameworks. These results emphasize the important role that phase synchronization, desynchronization, and thus, inhibition, play in the construction of compositional meaning by distributed neural networks in the brain. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.

Dataset Information

Auditory-motor synchronization varies among individuals and is critically shaped by acoustic features.

Publications

Auditory-motor synchronization varies among individuals and is critically shaped by acoustic features.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets