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The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke.

ABSTRACT: Competing theories of short-term memory function make specific predictions about the functional anatomy of auditory short-term memory and its role in language comprehension. We analysed high-resolution structural magnetic resonance images from 210 stroke patients and employed a novel voxel based analysis to test the relationship between auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension. Using digit span as an index of auditory short-term memory capacity we found that the structural integrity of a posterior region of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus predicted auditory short-term memory capacity, even when performance on a range of other measures was factored out. We show that the integrity of this region also predicts the ability to comprehend spoken sentences. Our results therefore support cognitive models that posit a shared substrate between auditory short-term memory capacity and speech comprehension ability. The method applied here will be particularly useful for modelling structure-function relationships within other complex cognitive domains.

SUBMITTER: Leff AP

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2792373 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke.

Leff Alexander P AP Schofield Thomas M TM Crinion Jennifer T JT Seghier Mohamed L ML Grogan Alice A Green David W DW Price Cathy J CJ

Brain : a journal of neurology 20091201 Pt 12

Competing theories of short-term memory function make specific predictions about the functional anatomy of auditory short-term memory and its role in language comprehension. We analysed high-resolution structural magnetic resonance images from 210 stroke patients and employed a novel voxel based analysis to test the relationship between auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension. Using digit span as an index of auditory short-term memory capacity we found that the structural integrity o ...[more]

PMID: 19892765

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Project description:Background: Numerous studies have demonstrated that individuals exhibit structured neural activity in many brain regions during rest that is also observed during different tasks, however it is still not clear whether and how resting state activity patterns may relate to underlying tuning for specific stimuli. In the posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG), distinct neural activity patterns are observed during the perception of specific linguistic speech features. We hypothesized that spontaneous resting-state neural dynamics of the STG would be structured to reflect its role in speech perception, exhibiting an organization along speech features as seen during speech perception. Methods: Human cortical local field potentials were recorded from the superior temporal gyrus (STG) in 8 patients undergoing surgical treatment of epilepsy. Signals were recorded during speech perception and rest. Patterns of neural activity (high gamma power: 70-150 Hz) during rest, extracted with spatiotemporal principal component analysis, were compared to spatiotemporal neural responses to speech features during perception. Hierarchical clustering was applied to look for patterns in rest that corresponded to speech feature tuning. Results: Significant correlations were found between neural responses to speech features (sentence onsets, consonants, and vowels) and the spontaneous neural activity in the STG. Across subjects, these correlations clustered into five groups, demonstrating tuning for speech features-most robustly for acoustic onsets. These correlations were not seen in other brain areas, or during motor and spectrally-rotated speech control tasks. Conclusions: In this study, we present evidence that the RS structure of STG activity robustly recapitulates its stimulus-evoked response to acoustic onsets. Further, secondary patterns in RS activity appear to correlate with stimulus-evoked responses to speech features. The role of these spontaneous spatiotemporal activity patterns remains to be elucidated.

Project description:Experimentalists studying multisensory integration compare neural responses to multisensory stimuli with responses to the component modalities presented in isolation. This procedure is problematic for multisensory speech perception since audiovisual speech and auditory-only speech are easily intelligible but visual-only speech is not. To overcome this confound, we developed intracranial encephalography (iEEG) deconvolution. Individual stimuli always contained both auditory and visual speech, but jittering the onset asynchrony between modalities allowed for the time course of the unisensory responses and the interaction between them to be independently estimated. We applied this procedure to electrodes implanted in human epilepsy patients (both male and female) over the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), a brain area known to be important for speech perception. iEEG deconvolution revealed sustained positive responses to visual-only speech and larger, phasic responses to auditory-only speech. Confirming results from scalp EEG, responses to audiovisual speech were weaker than responses to auditory-only speech, demonstrating a subadditive multisensory neural computation. Leveraging the spatial resolution of iEEG, we extended these results to show that subadditivity is most pronounced in more posterior aspects of the pSTG. Across electrodes, subadditivity correlated with visual responsiveness, supporting a model in which visual speech enhances the efficiency of auditory speech processing in pSTG. The ability to separate neural processes may make iEEG deconvolution useful for studying a variety of complex cognitive and perceptual tasks.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Understanding speech is one of the most important human abilities. Speech perception uses information from both the auditory and visual modalities. It has been difficult to study neural responses to visual speech because visual-only speech is difficult or impossible to comprehend, unlike auditory-only and audiovisual speech. We used intracranial encephalography deconvolution to overcome this obstacle. We found that visual speech evokes a positive response in the human posterior superior temporal gyrus, enhancing the efficiency of auditory speech processing.

Dataset Information

The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke.

Publications

The left superior temporal gyrus is a shared substrate for auditory short-term memory and speech comprehension: evidence from 210 patients with stroke.

Similar Datasets

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