Neural correlates of auditory streaming in an objective behavioral task.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Itatani N
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4115563 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Numerous animal models have been used to investigate the neural mechanisms of auditory processing in complex acoustic environments, but it is unclear whether an animal's auditory attention is functionally similar to a human's in processing competing auditory scenes. Here we investigated the effects of attention capture in birds performing an objective auditory streaming paradigm. The classical ABAB… patterned pure tone sequences were modified and used for the task. We trained the birds to selectively attend to a target stream and only respond to the deviant appearing in the target stream, even though their attention may be captured by a deviant in the background stream. When no deviant appeared in the background stream, the birds experience the buildup of streaming process in a qualitatively similar way as they did in a subjective paradigm. Although the birds were trained to selectively attend to the target stream, they failed to avoid the involuntary attention switch caused by the background deviant, especially when the background deviant was sequentially unpredictable. Their global performance deteriorated more with increasingly salient background deviants, where the buildup process was reset by the background distractor. Moreover, sequential predictability of the background deviant facilitated the recovery of the buildup process after attention capture. This is the first study that addresses the perceptual consequences of the joint effects of top-down and bottom-up attention in behaving animals.
| S-EPMC7319309 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundHumans are able to extract regularities from complex auditory scenes in order to form perceptually meaningful elements. It has been shown previously that this process depends critically on both the temporal integration of the sensory input over time and the degree of frequency separation between concurrent sound sources. Our goal was to examine the relationship between these two aspects by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG). To achieve this aim, we combined time-frequency analysis on a sensor space level with source analysis. Our paradigm consisted of asymmetric ABA-tone triplets wherein the B-tones were presented temporally closer to the first A-tones, providing different tempi within the same sequence. Participants attended to the slowest B-rhythm whilst the frequency separation between tones was manipulated (0-, 2-, 4- and 10-semitones).ResultsThe results revealed that the asymmetric ABA-triplets spontaneously elicited periodic-sustained responses corresponding to the temporal distribution of the A-B and B-A tone intervals in all conditions. Moreover, when attending to the B-tones, the neural representations of the A- and B-streams were both detectable in the scenarios which allow perceptual streaming (2-, 4- and 10-semitones). Alongside this, the steady-state responses tuned to the presentation of the B-tones enhanced significantly with increase of the frequency separation between tones. However, the strength of the B-tones related steady-state responses dominated the strength of the A-tones responses in the 10-semitones condition. Conversely, the representation of the A-tones dominated the B-tones in the cases of 2- and 4-semitones conditions, in which a greater effort was required for completing the task. Additionally, the P1 evoked fields' component following the B-tones increased in magnitude with the increase of inter-tonal frequency difference.ConclusionsThe enhancement of the evoked fields in the source space, along with the B-tones related activity of the time-frequency results, likely reflect the selective enhancement of the attended B-stream. The results also suggested a dissimilar efficiency of the temporal integration of separate streams depending on the degree of frequency separation between the sounds. Overall, the present findings suggest that the neural effects of auditory streaming could be directly captured in the time-frequency spectrum at the sensor-space level.
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Project description:Two experiments used subjective and objective measures to study the automaticity and primacy of auditory streaming. Listeners heard sequences of "ABA-" triplets, where "A" and "B" were tones of different frequencies and "-" was a silent gap. Segregation was more frequently reported, and rhythmically deviant triplets less well detected, for a greater between-tone frequency separation and later in the sequence. In Experiment 1, performing a competing auditory task for the first part of the sequence led to a reduction in subsequent streaming compared to when the tones were attended throughout. This is consistent with focused attention promoting streaming, and/or with attention switches resetting it. However, the proportion of segregated reports increased more rapidly following a switch than at the start of a sequence, indicating that some streaming occurred automatically. Modeling ruled out a simple "covert attention" account of this finding. Experiment 2 required listeners to perform subjective and objective tasks concurrently. It revealed superior performance during integrated compared to segregated reports, beyond that explained by the codependence of the two measures on stimulus parameters. We argue that listeners have limited access to low-level stimulus representations once perceptual organization has occurred, and that subjective and objective streaming measures partly index the same processes.
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Project description:Observers can discriminate between correct versus incorrect perceptual decisions with feelings of confidence. The centro-parietal positivity build-up rate (CPP slope) has been suggested as a likely neural signature of accumulated evidence, which may guide both perceptual performance and confidence. However, CPP slope also covaries with reaction time, which also covaries with confidence in previous studies, and performance and confidence typically covary; thus, CPP slope may index signatures of perceptual performance rather than confidence per se. Moreover, perceptual metacognition-including neural correlates-has largely been studied in vision, with few exceptions. Thus, we lack understanding of domain-general neural signatures of perceptual metacognition outside vision. Here we designed a novel auditory pitch identification task and collected behavior with simultaneous 32-channel EEG in healthy adults. Participants saw two tone labels which varied in tonal distance on each trial (e.g., C vs D, C vs F), then heard a single auditory tone; they identified which label was correct and rated confidence. We found that pitch identification confidence varied with tonal distance, but performance, metacognitive sensitivity (trial-by-trial covariation of confidence with accuracy), and reaction time did not. Interestingly, however, while CPP slope covaried with performance and reaction time, it did not significantly covary with confidence. We interpret these results to mean that CPP slope is likely a signature of first-order perceptual processing and not confidence-specific signals or computations in auditory tasks. Our novel pitch identification task offers a valuable method to examine the neural correlates of auditory and domain-general perceptual confidence.
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Project description:Interoception, the perception of our body internal signals, plays a key role in maintaining homeostasis and guiding our behavior. Sometimes, we become aware of our body signals and use them in planning and strategic thinking. Here, we show behavioral and neural dissociations between learning to follow one's own heartbeat and metacognitive awareness of one's performance, in a heartbeat-tapping task performed before and after auditory feedback. The electroencephalography amplitude of the heartbeat-evoked potential in interoceptive learners, that is, participants whose accuracy of tapping to their heartbeat improved after auditory feedback, was higher compared with non-learners. However, an increase in gamma phase synchrony (30-45 Hz) after the heartbeat auditory feedback was present only in those participants showing agreement between objective interoceptive performance and metacognitive awareness. Source localization in a group of participants and direct cortical recordings in a single patient identified a network hub for interoceptive learning in the insular cortex. In summary, interoceptive learning may be mediated by the right insular response to the heartbeat, whereas metacognitive awareness of learning may be mediated by widespread cortical synchronization patterns.
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Project description:Biologically salient sounds, including speech, are rarely heard in isolation. Our brains must therefore organize the input arising from multiple sources into separate "streams" and, in the case of speech, map the acoustic components of the target signal onto meaning. These auditory and linguistic processes have traditionally been considered to occur sequentially and are typically studied independently [1, 2]. However, evidence that streaming is modified or reset by attention [3], and that lexical knowledge can affect reports of speech sound identity [4, 5], suggests that higher-level factors may influence perceptual organization. In two experiments, listeners heard sequences of repeated words or acoustically matched nonwords. After several presentations, they reported that the initial /s/ sound in each syllable formed a separate stream; the percept then fluctuated between the streamed and fused states in a bistable manner. In addition to measuring these verbal transformations, we assessed streaming objectively by requiring listeners to detect occasional targets-syllables containing a gap after the initial /s/. Performance was better when streaming caused the syllables preceding the target to transform from words into nonwords, rather than from nonwords into words. Our results show that auditory stream formation is influenced not only by the acoustic properties of speech sounds, but also by higher-level processes involved in recognizing familiar words.
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Project description:The control of emotions is of potentially great clinical relevance. Accordingly, there has been increasing interest in understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying the ability to switch efficiently between the processing of affective and non-affective information. Reports of asymmetrically increased switch costs when switching toward the more salient emotion task indicate specific demands in the flexible control of emotion. The neural mechanisms underlying affective task switching, however, are so far not fully understood. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) (N = 57), we observed that affective task switching was accompanied by increased activity in domain-general fronto-parietal control systems. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in the posterior medial frontal and anterolateral prefrontal cortex was directly related to affective switch costs, indicating that these regions play a particular role in individual differences in (affective) task-switching ability. Asymmetric switch costs were associated with increased activity in the right inferior frontal and dorsal anterior medial prefrontal cortex, two brain regions critical for response inhibition. This suggests that asymmetric switch costs might-to a great extent-reflect higher demands on inhibitory control of the dominant emotion task. These results contribute to a refined understanding of brain systems for the flexible control of emotions and thereby identify valuable target systems for future clinical research.
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Project description:Our ability to detect target sounds in complex acoustic backgrounds is often limited not by the ear's resolution, but by the brain's information-processing capacity. The neural mechanisms and loci of this "informational masking" are unknown. We combined magnetoencephalography with simultaneous behavioral measures in humans to investigate neural correlates of informational masking and auditory perceptual awareness in the auditory cortex. Cortical responses were sorted according to whether or not target sounds were detected by the listener in a complex, randomly varying multi-tone background known to produce informational masking. Detected target sounds elicited a prominent, long-latency response (50-250 ms), whereas undetected targets did not. In contrast, both detected and undetected targets produced equally robust auditory middle-latency, steady-state responses, presumably from the primary auditory cortex. These findings indicate that neural correlates of auditory awareness in informational masking emerge between early and late stages of processing within the auditory cortex.
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