Task-specific modulation of human auditory evoked response in a delayed-match-to-sample task

Auditory short-term memory in the primate auditory cortex

Sounds are fleeting, and assembling the sequence of inputs at the ear into a coherent percept requires auditory memory across various time scales. Auditory short-term memory comprises at least two components: an active ׳working memory' bolstered by rehearsal, and a sensory trace that may be passively retained. Working memory relies on representations recalled from long-term memory, and their rehearsal may require phonological mechanisms unique to humans. The sensory component, passive short-term memory (pSTM), is tractable to study in nonhuman primates, whose brain architecture and behavioral repertoire are comparable to our own. This review discusses recent advances in the behavioral and neurophysiological study of auditory memory with a focus on single-unit recordings from macaque monkeys performing delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) tasks. Monkeys appear to employ pSTM to solve these tasks, as evidenced by the impact of interfering stimuli on memory performance. In several regards, pSTM in monkeys resembles pitch memory in humans, and may engage similar neural mechanisms. Neural correlates of DMS performance have been observed throughout the auditory and prefrontal cortex, defining a network of areas supporting auditory STM with parallels to that supporting visual STM. These correlates include persistent neural firing, or a suppression of firing, during the delay period of the memory task, as well as suppression or (less commonly) enhancement of sensory responses when a sound is repeated as a ׳match' stimulus. Auditory STM is supported by a distributed temporo-frontal network in which sensitivity to stimulus history is an intrinsic feature of auditory processing. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Auditory working memory.

Interpreting the effects of altered brain anatomical connectivity on fMRI functional connectivity: a role for computational neural modeling

Recently, there have been a large number of studies using resting state fMRI to characterize abnormal brain connectivity in patients with a variety of neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders. However, interpreting what the differences in resting state fMRI functional connectivity (rsfMRI-FC) actually reflect in terms of the underlying neural pathology has proved to be elusive because of the complexity of brain anatomical connectivity. The same is the case for task-based fMRI studies. In the last few years, several groups have used large-scale neural modeling to help provide some insight into the relationship between brain anatomical connectivity and the corresponding patterns of fMRI-FC. In this paper we review several efforts at using large-scale neural modeling to investigate the relationship between structural connectivity and functional/effective connectivity to determine how alterations in structural connectivity are manifested in altered patterns of functional/effective connectivity. Because the alterations made in the anatomical connectivity between specific brain regions in the model are known in detail, one can use the results of these simulations to determine the corresponding alterations in rsfMRI-FC. Many of these simulation studies found that structural connectivity changes do not necessarily result in matching changes in functional/effective connectivity in the areas of structural modification. Often, it was observed that increases in functional/effective connectivity in the altered brain did not necessarily correspond to increases in the strength of the anatomical connection weights. Note that increases in rsfMRI-FC in patients have been interpreted in some cases as resulting from neural plasticity. These results suggest that this interpretation can be mistaken. The relevance of these simulation findings to the use of functional/effective fMRI connectivity as biomarkers for brain disorders is also discussed.

Neural correlates of auditory recognition memory in the primate dorsal temporal pole

Temporal pole (TP) cortex is associated with higher-order sensory perception and/or recognition memory, as human patients with damage in this region show impaired performance during some tasks requiring recognition memory (Olson et al. 2007). The underlying mechanisms of TP processing are largely based on examination of the visual nervous system in humans and monkeys, while little is known about neuronal activity patterns in the auditory portion of this region, dorsal TP (dTP; Poremba et al. 2003). The present study examines single-unit activity of dTP in rhesus monkeys performing a delayed matching-to-sample task utilizing auditory stimuli, wherein two sounds are determined to be the same or different. Neurons of dTP encode several task-relevant events during the delayed matching-to-sample task, and encoding of auditory cues in this region is associated with accurate recognition performance. Population activity in dTP shows a match suppression mechanism to identical, repeated sound stimuli similar to that observed in the visual object identification pathway located ventral to dTP (Desimone 1996; Nakamura and Kubota 1996). However, in contrast to sustained visual delay-related activity in nearby analogous regions, auditory delay-related activity in dTP is transient and limited. Neurons in dTP respond selectively to different sound stimuli and often change their sound response preferences between experimental contexts. Current findings suggest a significant role for dTP in auditory recognition memory similar in many respects to the visual nervous system, while delay memory firing patterns are not prominent, which may relate to monkeys' shorter forgetting thresholds for auditory vs. visual objects.

Left auditory cortex is involved in pairwise comparisons of the direction of frequency modulated tones

Evaluating series of complex sounds like those in speech and music requires sequential comparisons to extract task-relevant relations between subsequent sounds. With the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated whether sequential comparison of a specific acoustic feature within pairs of tones leads to a change in lateralized processing in the auditory cortex (AC) of humans. For this we used the active categorization of the direction (up vs. down) of slow frequency modulated (FM) tones. Several studies suggest that this task is mainly processed in the right AC. These studies, however, tested only the categorization of the FM direction of each individual tone. In the present study we ask the question whether the right lateralized processing changes when, in addition, the FM direction is compared within pairs of successive tones. For this we use an experimental approach involving contralateral noise presentation in order to explore the contributions made by the left and right AC in the completion of the auditory task. This method has already been applied to confirm the right-lateralized processing of the FM direction of individual tones. In the present study, the subjects were required to perform, in addition, a sequential comparison of the FM direction in pairs of tones. The results suggest a division of labor between the two hemispheres such that the FM direction of each individual tone is mainly processed in the right AC whereas the sequential comparison of this feature between tones in a pair is probably performed in the left AC.