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

Y1 - 2018

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

VL - 28

SP - 295

EP - 306

JO - Cerebral Cortex

JF - Cerebral Cortex

SN - 1047-3211

IS - 1

ER -