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Related Experiment Video

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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Published on: July 1, 2015

Distinct Regional Oscillatory Connectivity Patterns During Auditory Target and Novelty Processing.

Fahimeh Mamashli¹, Samantha Huang², Sheraz Khan²

¹Department of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA. fmamashli@mgh.harvard.edu.

Brain Topography

|May 23, 2020

Summary

Auditory attention pathways differ for expected and unexpected sounds. This study reveals distinct brain connectivity patterns for processing predictable target sounds versus unpredictable novel sounds.

Keywords:

Attention Auditory Magnetoencephalography Network Oscillation

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Auditory Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

Auditory attention enables focus on relevant sounds while detecting novel ones.
The neural pathways for processing expected versus unexpected auditory events remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if distinct brain pathways or differing communication patterns within a common system govern attention to expected versus unexpected auditory stimuli.
To analyze functional connectivity patterns during a cued auditory attention task.

Main Methods:

Utilized a PeSCAR analysis method on magnetoencephalography (MEG) data.
Calculated phase coherence of source activity between cortical regions of interest (ROIs) including superior temporal, frontal, and parietal areas.
Subjects performed a task involving detection of predictable target sounds and ignoring novel sounds.

Main Results:

Stronger functional connectivity for target stimuli between left superior temporal and left parietal ROIs, and left frontal and right parietal ROIs (beta band).
Stronger functional connectivity for novel stimuli in inter-hemispheric connections between left and right frontal ROIs (alpha band, early time windows).

Conclusions:

Auditory processing of expected targets and unexpected novel sounds involves distinct, spatially, temporally, and spectrally distributed oscillatory connectivity patterns.
Findings suggest different neural systems or communication modes for processing expected versus unexpected auditory information.