Brain activity underlying auditory perceptual learning during short period training: simultaneous fMRI and EEG recording

Abstract

BackgroundThere is an accumulating body of evidence indicating that neuronal functional specificity to basic sensory stimulation is mutable and subject to experience. Although fMRI experiments have investigated changes in brain activity after relative to before perceptual learning, brain activity during perceptual learning has not been explored. This work investigated brain activity related to auditory frequency discrimination learning using a variational Bayesian approach for source localization, during simultaneous EEG and fMRI recording. We investigated whether the practice effects are determined solely by activity in stimulus-driven mechanisms or whether high-level attentional mechanisms, which are linked to the perceptual task, control the learning process.ResultsThe results of fMRI analyses revealed significant attention and learning related activity in left and right superior temporal gyrus STG as well as the left inferior frontal gyrus IFG. Current source localization of simultaneously recorded EEG data was estimated using a variational Bayesian method. Analysis of current localized to the left inferior frontal gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus revealed gamma band activity correlated with behavioral performance.ConclusionsRapid improvement in task performance is accompanied by plastic changes in the sensory cortex as well as superior areas gated by selective attention. Together the fMRI and EEG results suggest that gamma band activity in the right STG and left IFG plays an important role during perceptual learning.

Dynamic changes in network activations characterize early learning of a natural language

“…The frontal-parietal/occipital distribution of these two ICs strongly suggests a role in executive control of the processing of the input. Similar activations are widely reported during basic auditory processing tasks (e.g., Anderson, Ferguson, Lopez-Larson, & Yurgelun-Todd, 2010; de Souza, Yehia, Sato, & Callan, 2013; Henry, Herrmann, & Obleser, in press; Sabri, Humphries, Binder, & Liebenthal, 2008; Shaywitz, Shaywitz, Pugh, Fulbright, Skudlarski, Mencl, & Gore, 2001; Sturm et al, 2011) and these effects are typically bilateral. In the present study, bilateral activation was seen, but it was segregated across two independent components, which showed left and right hemisphere lateralization respectively.…”

“…Left lateralized activations, similar to that in IC-2, have also been reported for improvements in processing of nonspeech sound contrasts (de Souza et al, 2013) and under conditions that vary attentional load for processing non-meaningful consonant-vowel stimuli (Westerhousen, Moosmann, Alho, Belsby, Hämäläinen, Medvedev, & Hugdahl, 2010). For this reason, we suggest that IC-2 may have reflected attention to short-duration acoustic information in the speech stream.…”

Short-term learning effect in different psychoacoustic measures

“…Most of these studies on perceptual learning in psychoacoustic measures have tested long-term learning, going on for several days. Only a few tested short-term learning but nonetheless reported on training effect [41,44,45]. Moreover, Cohen et al [44] suggested that shorter training sessions facilitate more latent learning.…”

Better ears with eyes open: effects of multisensory stimulation with nonconscious visual stimuli on auditory learning

“…Likewise, most researches on auditory learning extend their experiments for several days (e.g. Cuddy, 1970;Menning et al, 2000;Foxton & Brown, 2004;Russo et al, 2005;Seppanen et al, 2012;Paraskevopoulos et al, 2012), although neural plasticity has been documented to take place rapidly, even after a single training session with auditory and visual (Souza et al, 2013) and audiovisual stimulation (Zilber et al, 2014). In this context, it is noteworthy that our results emerged from a very short training protocol: approximately 55 min.…”