TY - JOUR
T1 - Task-Modulated Cortical Representations of Natural Sound Source Categories
AU - Hjortkjær, Jens
AU - Kassuba, Tanja
AU - Madsen, Kristoffer H
AU - Skov, Martin
AU - Siebner, Hartwig R
N1 - © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - In everyday sound environments, we recognize sound sources and events by attending to relevant aspects of an acoustic input. Evidence about the cortical mechanisms involved in extracting relevant category information from natural sounds is, however, limited to speech. Here, we used functional MRI to measure cortical response patterns while human listeners categorized real-world sounds created by objects of different solid materials (glass, metal, wood) manipulated by different sound-producing actions (striking, rattling, dropping). In different sessions, subjects had to identify either material or action categories in the same sound stimuli. The sound-producing action and the material of the sound source could be decoded from multivoxel activity patterns in auditory cortex, including Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale. Importantly, decoding success depended on task relevance and category discriminability. Action categories were more accurately decoded in auditory cortex when subjects identified action information. Conversely, the material of the same sound sources was decoded with higher accuracy in the inferior frontal cortex during material identification. Representational similarity analyses indicated that both early and higher-order auditory cortex selectively enhanced spectrotemporal features relevant to the target category. Together, the results indicate a cortical selection mechanism that favors task-relevant information in the processing of nonvocal sound categories.
AB - In everyday sound environments, we recognize sound sources and events by attending to relevant aspects of an acoustic input. Evidence about the cortical mechanisms involved in extracting relevant category information from natural sounds is, however, limited to speech. Here, we used functional MRI to measure cortical response patterns while human listeners categorized real-world sounds created by objects of different solid materials (glass, metal, wood) manipulated by different sound-producing actions (striking, rattling, dropping). In different sessions, subjects had to identify either material or action categories in the same sound stimuli. The sound-producing action and the material of the sound source could be decoded from multivoxel activity patterns in auditory cortex, including Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale. Importantly, decoding success depended on task relevance and category discriminability. Action categories were more accurately decoded in auditory cortex when subjects identified action information. Conversely, the material of the same sound sources was decoded with higher accuracy in the inferior frontal cortex during material identification. Representational similarity analyses indicated that both early and higher-order auditory cortex selectively enhanced spectrotemporal features relevant to the target category. Together, the results indicate a cortical selection mechanism that favors task-relevant information in the processing of nonvocal sound categories.
KW - Acoustic Stimulation/methods
KW - Adult
KW - Attention/physiology
KW - Auditory Perception/physiology
KW - Brain Mapping
KW - Cerebral Cortex/diagnostic imaging
KW - Cerebrovascular Circulation/physiology
KW - Female
KW - Humans
KW - Magnetic Resonance Imaging
KW - Male
KW - Neuropsychological Tests
KW - Oxygen/blood
KW - Young Adult
U2 - 10.1093/cercor/bhx263
DO - 10.1093/cercor/bhx263
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 29069292
SN - 1047-3211
VL - 28
SP - 295
EP - 306
JO - Cerebral Cortex
JF - Cerebral Cortex
IS - 1
ER -