Coding of Basic Acoustical and Perceptual Components of Sound in Human Auditory Cortex

Neuroimaging studies are important for developing an understanding of the functional organization of human auditory cortex. This chapter summarizes the contributions from human neuroimaging studies that have examined cortical responses to a range of different sound stimuli. Although somewhat simpler than natural sounds, laboratory-generated sounds represent fundamental elements that are nonetheless important because they enable tight experimental control over other potentially confounding acoustical variables such as irregular variations in spectral complexity, spatial position, and level over time. Synthesized sound elements of interest include single-frequency and broadband spectra, sound level, sinusoidal spectrotemporal modulation, and pitch. Experimental studies that search for the cortical representation of these sound features are mostly presented from the field of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (Talavage, Johnsrude, and Gonzalez Castillo, Chapter 6), but findings from other neuroimaging modalities are also reported. The chapter concludes (Section 7.7) with some examples of how novel approaches to experimental design and analysis are beginning to reveal how auditory stimulus attributes have spatially overlapping organizations