Evidence for distinct human auditory cortex regions for sound location versus identity processing

Neurophysiological animal models suggest that anterior auditory cortex (AC) areas process sound-identity information, whereas posterior ACs specialize in sound location processing. In humans, inconsistent neuroimaging results and insufficient causal evidence have challenged the existence of such parallel AC organization. Here we transiently inhibit bilateral anterior or posterior AC areas using MRI-guided paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) while subjects listen to Reference/Probe sound pairs and perform either sound location or identity discrimination tasks. The targeting of TMS pulses, delivered 55–145 ms after Probes, is confirmed with individual-level cortical electric-field estimates. Our data show that TMS to posterior AC regions delays reaction times (RT) significantly more during sound location than identity discrimination, whereas TMS to anterior AC regions delays RTs significantly more during sound identity than location discrimination. This double dissociation provides direct causal support for parallel processing of sound identity features in anterior AC and sound location in posterior AC

Increasing fMRI Sampling Rate Improves Granger Causality Estimates

Estimation of causal interactions between brain areas is necessary for elucidating large-scale functional brain networks underlying behavior and cognition. Granger causality analysis of time series data can quantitatively estimate directional information flow between brain regions. Here, we show that such estimates are significantly improved when the temporal sampling rate of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is increased 20-fold. Specifically, healthy volunteers performed a simple visuomotor task during blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast based whole-head inverse imaging (InI). Granger causality analysis based on raw InI BOLD data sampled at 100-ms resolution detected the expected causal relations, whereas when the data were downsampled to the temporal resolution of 2 s typically used in echo-planar fMRI, the causality could not be detected. An additional control analysis, in which we SINC interpolated additional data points to the downsampled time series at 0.1-s intervals, confirmed that the improvements achieved with the real InI data were not explainable by the increased time-series length alone. We therefore conclude that the high-temporal resolution of InI improves the Granger causality connectivity analysis of the human brain

Dissociable Influences of Auditory Object vs. Spatial Attention on Visual System Oscillatory Activity

Given that both auditory and visual systems have anatomically separate object identification (“what”) and spatial (“where”) pathways, it is of interest whether attention-driven cross-sensory modulations occur separately within these feature domains. Here, we investigated how auditory “what” vs. “where” attention tasks modulate activity in visual pathways using cortically constrained source estimates of magnetoencephalograpic (MEG) oscillatory activity. In the absence of visual stimuli or tasks, subjects were presented with a sequence of auditory-stimulus pairs and instructed to selectively attend to phonetic (“what”) vs. spatial (“where”) aspects of these sounds, or to listen passively. To investigate sustained modulatory effects, oscillatory power was estimated from time periods between sound-pair presentations. In comparison to attention to sound locations, phonetic auditory attention was associated with stronger alpha (7–13 Hz) power in several visual areas (primary visual cortex; lingual, fusiform, and inferior temporal gyri, lateral occipital cortex), as well as in higher-order visual/multisensory areas including lateral/medial parietal and retrosplenial cortices. Region-of-interest (ROI) analyses of dynamic changes, from which the sustained effects had been removed, suggested further power increases during Attend Phoneme vs. Location centered at the alpha range 400–600 ms after the onset of second sound of each stimulus pair. These results suggest distinct modulations of visual system oscillatory activity during auditory attention to sound object identity (“what”) vs. sound location (“where”). The alpha modulations could be interpreted to reflect enhanced crossmodal inhibition of feature-specific visual pathways and adjacent audiovisual association areas during “what” vs. “where” auditory attention

Depression core network-based individualized targeting for transcranial magnetic stimulation

Peer reviewe

MEG Source Localization Using Invariance of Noise Space

<div><p>We propose INvariance of Noise (INN) space as a novel method for source localization of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. The method is based on the fact that modulations of source strengths across time change the energy in signal subspace but leave the noise subspace invariant. We compare INN with classical MUSIC, RAP-MUSIC, and beamformer approaches using simulated data while varying signal-to-noise ratios as well as distance and temporal correlation between two sources. We also demonstrate the utility of INN with actual auditory evoked MEG responses in eight subjects. In all cases, INN performed well, especially when the sources were closely spaced, highly correlated, or one source was considerably stronger than the other.</p> </div

Localization of Class 2 real auditory evoked responses using the different methods.

<p>The red points indicate the peaks of the cost functions. The threshold was set to 80% of peak of the cost function within the corresponding source region. To show the underlying anatomical structure, the transparency of the overlaid images was set to 50%. INN identified sources at the left and right supratemporal auditory cortices. MUSIC and BEAMFORMER only detected a source in the left auditory cortex. RAP-MUSIC (2^nd recursion) misplaced a false source at midline.</p