Mapping the spatiotemporal dynamics of processing task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant sound feature changes using concurrent EEG‐fMRI

Abstract

The cortical processing of changes in auditory input involves auditory sensory regions as well as different frontoparietal brain networks. The spatiotemporal dynamics of the activation spread across these networks has, however, not been investigated in detail so far. We here approached this issue using concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), providing us with simultaneous information on both the spatial and temporal patterns of change‐related activity. We applied an auditory stimulus categorization task with switching categorization rules, allowing to analyze change‐related responses as a function of the changing sound feature (pitch or duration) and the task relevance of the change. Our data show the successive progression of change‐related activity from regions involved in early change detection to the ventral and dorsal attention networks, and finally the central executive network. While early change detection was found to recruit feature‐specific networks involving auditory sensory but also frontal and parietal brain regions, the later spread of activity across the frontoparietal attention and executive networks was largely independent of the changing sound feature, suggesting the existence of a general feature‐independent processing pathway of change‐related information. Task relevance did not modulate early auditory sensory processing, but was mainly found to affect processing in frontal brain regions. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3400–3416, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cooperating yet distinct brain networks engaged during naturalistic paradigms: A meta-analysis of functional MRI results

“…Per functional decoding of MAG 6 of both manual and automated annotations, MAG 6 is associated with visuospatial attention. This functional characterization is also supported by corresponding fronto-parietal activations that are often associated with attending to visual stimuli (Braga et al, 2016; Puschmann et al, 2016). MAGs 1 and 5 represent the perceptual processing streams of audiovisual information.…”

The Right Temporoparietal Junction Supports Speech Tracking During Selective Listening: Evidence from Concurrent EEG-fMRI

“…Since the early work by Cherry (1953), the sensory, cognitive, and neural processes contributing to solving this "cocktail party problem" have been investigated (McDermott, 2009;Anderson and Kraus, 2010;Rönnberg et al, 2013;Bidel-man and Dexter, 2015;Bronkhorst, 2015;Coffey et al, 2017). On the neural level, it has been shown that competing auditory streams are encoded individually at the level of the auditory cortex (Simon, 2015). Focusing attention selectively to one out of several competing sound streams results in an increased representation of the attended stream in the auditory cortex while simultaneously decreasing responses to the irrelevant input (Teder et al, 1993;Bidet-Caulet et al, 2007;Ross et al, 2010;Xiang et al, 2010;Power et al, 2011;Ding and Simon, 2012a;Mesgarani and Chang, 2012).…”

“…On the neural level, it has been shown that competing auditory streams are encoded individually at the level of the auditory cortex (Simon, 2015). Focusing attention selectively to one out of several competing sound streams results in an increased representation of the attended stream in the auditory cortex while simultaneously decreasing responses to the irrelevant input (Teder et al, 1993;Bidet-Caulet et al, 2007;Ross et al, 2010;Xiang et al, 2010;Power et al, 2011;Ding and Simon, 2012a;Mesgarani and Chang, 2012). Therefore, the attended stream dominates the ongoing auditory cortex activity.…”

“…Recent studies successfully demonstrated that the relative cortical representation of competing speech streams in multispeaker situations can be assessed reliably from electrophysiological responses using stimulus reconstruction approaches (Ding and Simon, 2012b;Zion Golumbic et al, 2013;Crosse et al, 2016b). Stimulus reconstruction accuracies are typically higher for selectively attended than for ignored speech streams, allowing for a robust classification of the listener's focus of attention (Mirkovic et al, 2015). Further, individual differences in stimulus reconstruction accuracies have been linked to selective listening performance, suggesting that this measure can be used to quantify the strength of attention directed to the to-be-attended speech stream (O'Sullivan et al, 2015).…”

“…Stimulus reconstruction accuracies are typically higher for selectively attended than for ignored speech streams, allowing for a robust classification of the listener's focus of attention (Mirkovic et al, 2015). Further, individual differences in stimulus reconstruction accuracies have been linked to selective listening performance, suggesting that this measure can be used to quantify the strength of attention directed to the to-be-attended speech stream (O'Sullivan et al, 2015).…”