Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

25 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Auditory and tactile frequency representations are co-embedded in modality-defined cortical sensory systems.

ABSTRACT: Sensory information is represented and elaborated in hierarchical cortical systems that are thought to be dedicated to individual sensory modalities. This traditional view of sensory cortex organization has been challenged by recent evidence of multimodal responses in primary and association sensory areas. Although it is indisputable that sensory areas respond to multiple modalities, it remains unclear whether these multimodal responses reflect selective information processing for particular stimulus features. Here, we used fMRI adaptation to identify brain regions that are sensitive to the temporal frequency information contained in auditory, tactile, and audiotactile stimulus sequences. A number of brain regions distributed over the parietal and temporal lobes exhibited frequency-selective temporal response modulation for both auditory and tactile stimulus events, as indexed by repetition suppression effects. A smaller set of regions responded to crossmodal adaptation sequences in a frequency-dependent manner. Despite an extensive overlap of multimodal frequency-selective responses across the parietal and temporal lobes, representational similarity analysis revealed a cortical "regional landscape" that clearly reflected distinct somatosensory and auditory processing systems that converged on modality-invariant areas. These structured relationships between brain regions were also evident in spontaneous signal fluctuation patterns measured at rest. Our results reveal that multimodal processing in human cortex can be feature-specific and that multimodal frequency representations are embedded in the intrinsically hierarchical organization of cortical sensory systems.

SUBMITTER: Rahman MS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7292761 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Similar Datasets

Auditory Frequency Representations in Human Somatosensory Cortex.

Project description:Recent studies have challenged the traditional notion of modality-dedicated cortical systems by showing that audition and touch evoke responses in the same sensory brain regions. While much of this work has focused on somatosensory responses in auditory regions, fewer studies have investigated sound responses and representations in somatosensory regions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we measured BOLD signal changes in participants performing an auditory frequency discrimination task and characterized activation patterns related to stimulus frequency using both univariate and multivariate analysis approaches. Outside of bilateral temporal lobe regions, we observed robust and frequency-specific responses to auditory stimulation in classically defined somatosensory areas. Moreover, using representational similarity analysis to define the relationships between multi-voxel activation patterns for all sound pairs, we found clear similarity patterns for auditory responses in the parietal lobe that correlated significantly with perceptual similarity judgments. Our results demonstrate that auditory frequency representations can be distributed over brain regions traditionally considered to be dedicated to somatosensation. The broad distribution of auditory and tactile responses over parietal and temporal regions reveals a number of candidate brain areas that could support general temporal frequency processing and mediate the extensive and robust perceptual interactions between audition and touch.

| S-EPMC6188539 | biostudies-literature

Flexible Sensory Representations in Auditory Cortex Driven by Behavioral Relevance.

Project description:Animals require the ability to ignore sensory stimuli that have no consequence yet respond to the same stimuli when they become useful. However, the brain circuits that govern this flexibility in sensory processing are not well understood. Here we show in mouse primary auditory cortex (A1) that daily passive sound exposure causes a long-lasting reduction in representations of the experienced sound by layer 2/3 pyramidal cells. This habituation arises locally in A1 and involves an enhancement in inhibition and selective upregulation in the activity of somatostatin-expressing inhibitory neurons (SOM cells). Furthermore, when mice engage in sound-guided behavior, pyramidal cell excitatory responses to habituated sounds are enhanced, whereas SOM cell responses are diminished. Together, our results demonstrate the bidirectional modulation of A1 sensory representations and suggest that SOM cells gate cortical information flow based on the behavioral relevance of the stimulus.

| S-EPMC4670799 | biostudies-literature

Multi-structure Cortical States Deduced From Intracellular Representations of Fixed Tactile Input Patterns.

Project description:The brain has a never-ending internal activity, whose spatiotemporal evolution interacts with external inputs to constrain their impact on brain activity and thereby how we perceive them. We used reproducible touch-related spatiotemporal sensory inputs and recorded intracellularly from rat (Sprague-Dawley, male) neocortical neurons to characterize this interaction. The synaptic responses, or the summed input of the networks connected to the neuron, varied greatly to repeated presentations of the same tactile input pattern delivered to the tip of digit 2. Surprisingly, however, these responses tended to sort into a set of specific time-evolving response types, unique for each neuron. Further, using a set of eight such tactile input patterns, we found each neuron to exhibit a set of specific response types for each input provided. Response types were not determined by the global cortical state, but instead likely depended on the time-varying state of the specific subnetworks connected to each neuron. The fact that some types of responses recurred indicates that the cortical network had a non-continuous landscape of solutions for these tactile inputs. Therefore, our data suggest that sensory inputs combine with the internal dynamics of the brain networks, thereby causing them to fall into one of the multiple possible perceptual attractor states. The neuron-specific instantiations of response types we observed suggest that the subnetworks connected to each neuron represent different components of those attractor states. Our results indicate that the impact of cortical internal states on external inputs is substantially more richly resolvable than previously shown.

| S-EPMC8236821 | biostudies-literature

Prestimulus influences on auditory perception from sensory representations and decision processes.

Project description:The qualities of perception depend not only on the sensory inputs but also on the brain state before stimulus presentation. Although the collective evidence from neuroimaging studies for a relation between prestimulus state and perception is strong, the interpretation in the context of sensory computations or decision processes has remained difficult. In the auditory system, for example, previous studies have reported a wide range of effects in terms of the perceptually relevant frequency bands and state parameters (phase/power). To dissociate influences of state on earlier sensory representations and higher-level decision processes, we collected behavioral and EEG data in human participants performing two auditory discrimination tasks relying on distinct acoustic features. Using single-trial decoding, we quantified the relation between prestimulus activity, relevant sensory evidence, and choice in different task-relevant EEG components. Within auditory networks, we found that phase had no direct influence on choice, whereas power in task-specific frequency bands affected the encoding of sensory evidence. Within later-activated frontoparietal regions, theta and alpha phase had a direct influence on choice, without involving sensory evidence. These results delineate two consistent mechanisms by which prestimulus activity shapes perception. However, the timescales of the relevant neural activity depend on the specific brain regions engaged by the respective task.

| S-EPMC4855557 | biostudies-other

Uncertainty in visual and auditory series is coded by modality-general and modality-specific neural systems.

Project description:Coding for the degree of disorder in a temporally unfolding sensory input allows for optimized encoding of these inputs via information compression and predictive processing. Prior neuroimaging work has examined sensitivity to statistical regularities within single sensory modalities and has associated this function with the hippocampus, anterior cingulate, and lateral temporal cortex. Here we investigated to what extent sensitivity to input disorder, quantified by Markov entropy, is subserved by modality-general or modality-specific neural systems when participants are not required to monitor the input. Participants were presented with rapid (3.3 Hz) auditory and visual series varying over four levels of entropy, while monitoring an infrequently changing fixation cross. For visual series, sensitivity to the magnitude of disorder was found in early visual cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the intraparietal sulcus. For auditory series, sensitivity was found in inferior frontal, lateral temporal, and supplementary motor regions implicated in speech perception and sequencing. Ventral premotor and central cingulate cortices were identified as possible candidates for modality-general uncertainty processing, exhibiting marginal sensitivity to disorder in both modalities. The right temporal pole differentiated the highest and lowest levels of disorder in both modalities, but did not show general sensitivity to the parametric manipulation of disorder. Our results indicate that neural sensitivity to input disorder relies largely on modality-specific systems embedded in extended sensory cortices, though uncertainty-related processing in frontal regions may be driven by both input modalities.

| S-EPMC6869520 | biostudies-literature

Contextual and cross-modality modulation of auditory cortical processing through pulvinar mediated suppression.

Project description:Lateral posterior nucleus (LP) of thalamus, the rodent homologue of primate pulvinar, projects extensively to sensory cortices. However, its functional role in sensory cortical processing remains largely unclear. Here, bidirectional activity modulations of LP or its projection to the primary auditory cortex (A1) in awake mice reveal that LP improves auditory processing in A1 supragranular-layer neurons by sharpening their receptive fields and frequency tuning, as well as increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is achieved through a subtractive-suppression mechanism, mediated largely by LP-to-A1 axons preferentially innervating specific inhibitory neurons in layer 1 and superficial layers. LP is strongly activated by specific sensory signals relayed from the superior colliculus (SC), contributing to the maintenance and enhancement of A1 processing in the presence of auditory background noise and threatening visual looming stimuli respectively. Thus, a multisensory bottom-up SC-pulvinar-A1 pathway plays a role in contextual and cross-modality modulation of auditory cortical processing.

| S-EPMC7080503 | biostudies-literature

Modulating Cortical Instrument Representations During Auditory Stream Segregation and Integration With Polyphonic Music.

Project description:Numerous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the auditory cortex tracks ongoing speech and that, in multi-speaker environments, tracking of the attended speaker is enhanced compared to the other irrelevant speakers. In contrast to speech, multi-instrument music can be appreciated by attending not only on its individual entities (i.e., segregation) but also on multiple instruments simultaneously (i.e., integration). We investigated the neural correlates of these two modes of music listening using electroencephalography (EEG) and sound envelope tracking. To this end, we presented uniquely composed music pieces played by two instruments, a bassoon and a cello, in combination with a previously validated music auditory scene analysis behavioral paradigm (Disbergen et al., 2018). Similar to results obtained through selective listening tasks for speech, relevant instruments could be reconstructed better than irrelevant ones during the segregation task. A delay-specific analysis showed higher reconstruction for the relevant instrument during a middle-latency window for both the bassoon and cello and during a late window for the bassoon. During the integration task, we did not observe significant attentional modulation when reconstructing the overall music envelope. Subsequent analyses indicated that this null result might be due to the heterogeneous strategies listeners employ during the integration task. Overall, our results suggest that subsequent to a common processing stage, top-down modulations consistently enhance the relevant instrument's representation during an instrument segregation task, whereas such an enhancement is not observed during an instrument integration task. These findings extend previous results from speech tracking to the tracking of multi-instrument music and, furthermore, inform current theories on polyphonic music perception.

| S-EPMC8498193 | biostudies-literature

Frequency-specific coupling in fronto-parieto-occipital cortical circuits underlie active tactile discrimination.

Project description:Processing of tactile sensory information in rodents is critically dependent on the communication between the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and higher-order integrative cortical areas. Here, we have simultaneously characterized single-unit activity and local field potential (LFP) dynamics in the S1, primary visual cortex (V1), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), posterior parietal cortex (PPC), while freely moving rats performed an active tactile discrimination task. Simultaneous single unit recordings from all these cortical regions revealed statistically significant neuronal firing rate modulations during all task phases (anticipatory, discrimination, response, and reward). Meanwhile, phase analysis of pairwise LFP recordings revealed the occurrence of long-range synchronization across the sampled fronto-parieto-occipital cortical areas during tactile sampling. Causal analysis of the same pairwise recorded LFPs demonstrated the occurrence of complex dynamic interactions between cortical areas throughout the fronto-parietal-occipital loop. These interactions changed significantly between cortical regions as a function of frequencies (i.e. beta, theta and gamma) and according to the different phases of the behavioral task. Overall, these findings indicate that active tactile discrimination by rats is characterized by much more widespread and dynamic complex interactions within the fronto-parieto-occipital cortex than previously anticipated.

| S-EPMC6434051 | biostudies-literature

Sensory representation of an auditory cued tactile stimulus in the posterior parietal cortex of the mouse.

Project description:Sensory association cortices receive diverse inputs with their role in representing and integrating multi-sensory content remaining unclear. Here we examined the neuronal correlates of an auditory-tactile stimulus sequence in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) using 2-photon calcium imaging in awake mice. We find that neuronal subpopulations in layer 2/3 of PPC reliably represent texture-touch events, in addition to auditory cues that presage the incoming tactile stimulus. Notably, altering the flow of sensory events through omission of the cued texture touch elicited large responses in a subset of neurons hardly responsive to or even inhibited by the tactile stimuli. Hence, PPC neurons were able to discriminate not only tactile stimulus features (i.e., texture graininess) but also between the presence and omission of the texture stimulus. Whereas some of the neurons responsive to texture omission were driven by looming-like auditory sounds others became recruited only with tactile sensory experience. These findings indicate that layer 2/3 neuronal populations in PPC potentially encode correlates of expectancy in addition to auditory and tactile stimuli.

| S-EPMC5958066 | biostudies-literature

Noise differentially impacts phoneme representations in the auditory and speech motor systems.

Project description:Although it is well accepted that the speech motor system (SMS) is activated during speech perception, the functional role of this activation remains unclear. Here we test the hypothesis that the redundant motor activation contributes to categorical speech perception under adverse listening conditions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants identified one of four phoneme tokens (/ba/, /ma/, /da/, or /ta/) under one of six signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels (-12, -9, -6, -2, 8 dB, and no noise). Univariate and multivariate pattern analyses were used to determine the role of the SMS during perception of noise-impoverished phonemes. Results revealed a negative correlation between neural activity and perceptual accuracy in the left ventral premotor cortex and Broca's area. More importantly, multivoxel patterns of activity in the left ventral premotor cortex and Broca's area exhibited effective phoneme categorization when SNR ? -6 dB. This is in sharp contrast with phoneme discriminability in bilateral auditory cortices and sensorimotor interface areas (e.g., left posterior superior temporal gyrus), which was reliable only when the noise was extremely weak (SNR > 8 dB). Our findings provide strong neuroimaging evidence for a greater robustness of the SMS than auditory regions for categorical speech perception in noise. Under adverse listening conditions, better discriminative activity in the SMS may compensate for loss of specificity in the auditory system via sensorimotor integration.

| S-EPMC4024897 | biostudies-other

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data