Auditory decisions in the supplementary motor area

Morán, Isaac; Pérez-Orive, Javier; Melchor, Jonathan; Figueroa, Tonatiuh; Lemus, Luis

doi:10.1016/j.pneurobio.2021.102053

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…A recent study found that SMA plays an important role for the transformation of auditory information into categorical responses during auditory decisions. Morán and colleagues (2021) recorded extracellular activity directly from SMA neurons in rhesus monkeys that were trained to categorize numerous complex sounds, including words. When the authors presented sounds along the continuum between two categories they observed that the neural response during auditory stimulus presentation varied gradually as a function of the changing sensory stimulus, while the neural responses during the button responses showed a categorical pattern that was consistent with the behavioral choices of the animal.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech sound categorization: The contribution of non-auditory and auditory cortical regions

Preisig

Riecke

Hervais-Adelman

2021

Preprint

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What processes lead to categorical perception of speech sounds? Investigation of this question is hampered by the fact that categorical speech perception is normally confounded by acoustic differences in the stimulus. By using ambiguous sounds, however, it is possible to dissociate acoustic from perceptual stimulus representations. We used a binaural integration task, where the inputs to the two ears were complementary so that phonemic identity emerged from their integration into a single percept. Twenty-seven normally hearing individuals took part in an fMRI study in which they were presented with an ambiguous syllable (intermediate between /da/ and /ga/) in one ear and with a meaning-differentiating acoustic feature (third formant) in the other ear. Multi-voxel pattern searchlight analysis was used to identify brain areas that consistently differentiated between response patterns associated with different syllable reports. By comparing responses to different stimuli with identical syllable reports and identical stimuli with different syllable reports, we disambiguated whether these regions primarily differentiated the acoustics of the stimuli or the syllable report. We found that BOLD activity patterns in the left anterior insula (AI), the left supplementary motor cortex, the left ventral motor cortex and the right motor and somatosensory cortex (M1/S1) represent listeners' syllable report irrespective of stimulus acoustics. The same areas have been previously implicated in decision-making (AI), response selection (SMA), and response initiation and feedback (M1/S1). Our results indicate that the emergence of categorical speech sounds implicates decision-making mechanisms and auditory-motor transformations acting on sensory inputs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech sound categorization: The contribution of non-auditory and auditory cortical regions

Preisig

Riecke

Hervais-Adelman

2021

Preprint

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“…We attempted diverse strategies to instruct the monkeys. Some details about instructions have been published elsewhere (Morán et al, 2021). However, some key elements were the following: First, the animals learned to press the lever in response to a gray circle and release it after a monkey coo vocalization, a 0.5 s delay, and a 0.5 s GC.…”

Section: Monkeys Trainingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formant-Based Recognition of Words and Other Naturalistic Sounds in Rhesus Monkeys

et al. 2021

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In social animals, identifying sounds is critical for communication. In humans, the acoustic parameters involved in speech recognition, such as the formant frequencies derived from the resonance of the supralaryngeal vocal tract, have been well documented. However, how formants contribute to recognizing learned sounds in non-human primates remains unclear. To determine this, we trained two rhesus monkeys to discriminate target and non-target sounds presented in sequences of 1–3 sounds. After training, we performed three experiments: (1) We tested the monkeys’ accuracy and reaction times during the discrimination of various acoustic categories; (2) their ability to discriminate morphing sounds; and (3) their ability to identify sounds consisting of formant 1 (F1), formant 2 (F2), or F1 and F2 (F1F2) pass filters. Our results indicate that macaques can learn diverse sounds and discriminate from morphs and formants F1 and F2, suggesting that information from few acoustic parameters suffice for recognizing complex sounds. We anticipate that future neurophysiological experiments in this paradigm may help elucidate how formants contribute to the recognition of sounds.

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“…This mechanism could rely on the integration of visual and auditory representations in multisensory areas of the brain (Gaffan and Harrison, 1991; Calvert et al, 2001; Beauchamp et al, 2004; Khandhadia et al, 2021; Diehl et al, 2022; Lemus and Lafuente, 2022), or from connecting neuronal representations of monkey calls at the superior temporal gyrus (STG)(Leaver and Rauschecker, 2010; Tsunada et al, 2011; Bodin and Belin, 2020; Bodin et al, 2021) with unitary activity associated to a monkey face at the superior temporal sulcus (STS)(Tsao et al, 2003; Leopold et al, 2006; Ohayon et al, 2012; Arcaro et al, 2017; Khandhadia et al, 2021). Regardless of NHP being able to discriminate words phonetically(Melchor et al, 2021), it is unclear whether their brains can encode complex sounds like words (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007; Yi et al, 2019; Morán et al, 2021; Stephen et al, 2023) and associate them with visual representations to experience CME.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Invariant crossmodal equivalence evokes visual imagery from sounds in rhesus monkeys

Cabrera-Ruiz,

Alva,

Mata

et al. 2024

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After hearing the words Little Red Riding Hood, most humans instantly visualize a girl wearing a red hood in the woods. However, whether nonhuman primates also evoke such visual imagery from sounds remains an open question. We sought to explore this from direct behavioral measurements from two rhesus macaques trained in a delayed crossmodal equivalence task. In each trial, they listened to a sound, such as a monkey vocalization or a word, and three seconds later, selected a visual equivalent out of a pool of 2 to 4 pictures appearing on a touchscreen. We propose two potential mechanisms for the brain to solve this task: acoustic memory or visual imagery. In the first, sounds representations should remain in working memory to discriminate later against the pictures on the screen. In the second, listening to sounds could evoke visual representations of pictures that appear on the touchscreen afterward. After analyzing the monkeys’ choice accuracies and reaction times in the task, we deduce that they experience visual imagery when listening to sounds. Therefore, the ability of rhesus monkeys to perceive crossmodal equivalences between learned categories poses rhesus monkeys as an ideal model organism for studying high-order cognitive processes like semantics and conceptual thinking at the single-neuron level.

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Auditory decisions in the supplementary motor area

Cited by 5 publications

References 53 publications

Speech sound categorization: The contribution of non-auditory and auditory cortical regions

Speech sound categorization: The contribution of non-auditory and auditory cortical regions

Formant-Based Recognition of Words and Other Naturalistic Sounds in Rhesus Monkeys

Invariant crossmodal equivalence evokes visual imagery from sounds in rhesus monkeys

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