Brunner, P. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2019

Unexpected sound omissions are signaled in human posterior superior temporal gyrus: an intracranial study

Context modulates sensory neural activations enhancing perceptual and behavioral performance and reducing prediction errors. However, the mechanism of when and where these high-level expectations act on sensory processing is unclear. Here, we isolate the effect of expectation absent any auditory evoked activity by assessing the response to omitted expected sounds. Electrophysiological signals were recorded directly from the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS) in patients with medically refractory epilepsy. Subjects listened to a predictable sequence of syllables, with some infrequently omitted. We found a high frequency band (HFB, 70-150Hz) response to omissions, which overlap with a posterior subset of auditory active electrodes. This response is distinct from omission activations observed in non-auditory selective sites in STG. Heard syllables could be classified reliably from STG, but not the identity of the omitted stimulus. Both omission- and target detection activations were also observed in prefrontal cortex.\n\nWe propose that the posterior STG and STS are central for implementing predictions in the auditory environment. HFB omission activations in this region appear to index mismatch-signaling or salience detection processes.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Intracranial recordings from human auditory cortex reveal a neural population selective for musical song

How are neural representations of music organized in the human brain? While neuroimaging has suggested some segregation between responses to music and other sounds, it remains unclear whether finer-grained organization exists within the domain of music. To address this question, we measured cortical responses to natural sounds using intracranial recordings from human patients and inferred canonical response components using a data-driven decomposition algorithm. The inferred components replicated many prior findings including distinct neural selectivity for speech and music. Our key novel finding is that one component responded nearly exclusively to music with singing. Song selectivity was not explainable by standard acoustic features and was co-located with speech- and music-selective responses in the middle and anterior superior temporal gyrus. These results suggest that neural representations of music are fractionated into subpopulations selective for different types of music, at least one of which is specialized for the analysis of song.

neuroscience↗