Biology subjects

Degano, G.

Publications and source records attributed to Degano, G..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Feeling the music: Audiotactile encoding of temporal structure in the human brain

In everyday situations, like a rock party or an organ concert, we feel music vibrating through our bodies. How do these vibrotactile signals influence music processing? How do they aid auditory scene analysis? Combining psychophysics, fMRI and time-resolved EEG decoding, this work reveals how the brain encodes the temporal structure of music (beat and envelope) across audition and touch and uses this information to guide multisensory integration and segregation in simple and more complex perceptual scenes. Participants experienced monophonic and polyphonic piano pieces through auditory, vibrotactile and audiotactile stimulation. Vibrotactile signals improved the detection of a brief target embedded in music, establishing the functional relevance of audiotactile integration in naturalistic settings. fMRI and EEG multivariate decoding revealed that auditory and tactile beat information converged in planum temporale and parietal operculum, albeit through distinct neural dynamics and representations. Superior temporal cortices reliably encoded envelope information from audition, but only weakly from touch. Nevertheless, vibrotactile signals significantly enhanced neural encoding of auditory beat as early as 100 ms, and envelope representations from 250 ms onward. These encoding benefits were associated with superadditive interactions in primary auditory cortex, where tactile signals sharpen and amplify auditory envelope representations. In complex polyphonic music, touch further amplified the segregation and encoding of temporally coherent auditory streams. Our findings highlight the important, yet largely unexplored influence of touch on auditory processing, enriching music perception and supporting auditory scene analysis in real-world environments.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Intergenerational transmission of the structure of the auditory cortex and reading skills

High-level cognitive skill development relies on genetic and environmental factors, tied to brain structure and function. Inter-individual variability in language and music skills has been repeatedly associated with the structure of the auditory cortex: the shape, size and asymmetry of the transverse temporal gyrus (TTG) or gyri (TTGs). TTG is highly variable in shape and size, some individuals having one single gyrus (also referred to as Heschls gyrus, HG) while others presenting duplications (with a common stem or fully separated) or higher-order multiplications of TTG. Both genetic and environmental influences on childrens cognition, behavior, and brain can to some to degree be traced back to familial and parental factors. In the current study, using a unique MRI dataset of parents and children (135 individuals from 37 families), we ask whether the anatomy of the auditory cortex is related to reading skills, and whether there are intergenerational effects on TTG(s) anatomy. For this, we performed detailed, automatic segmentations of HG and of additional TTG(s), when present, extracting volume, surface area, thickness and shape of the gyri. We tested for relationships between these and reading skill, and assessed their degree of familial similarity and intergenerational transmission effects. We found that volume and area of all identified left TTG(s) combined was positively related to reading scores, both in children and adults. With respect to intergenerational similarities in the structure of the auditory cortex, we identified structural brain similarities for mother-child pairs of the 1st TTG (HG) (in terms of volume, area and thickness for the right HG, and shape for the left HG) and of the lateralization of all TTG(s) surface area for father-child pairs. Both the HG and TTG-lateralization findings were significantly more likely for parent-child dyads than for unrelated adult-child pairs. Furthermore, we established characteristics of parents TTG that are related to better reading abilities in children: fathers small left HG, and a small ratio of HG to planum temporale. Our results suggest intergenerational transmission of specific structural features of the auditory cortex (not directly linked to childrens reading outcomes); these may arise from genetics and/or from shared environment.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Speech prosody enhances the neural processing of syntax

Human language relies on the correct processing of syntactic information, as it is essential for successful communication between speakers. As an abstract level of language, syntax has often been studied separately from the physical form of the speech signal, thus often masking the interactions that can promote better syntactic processing in the human brain. We analyzed a MEG dataset to investigate how acoustic cues, specifically prosody, interact with syntactic representations. We examined whether prosody enhances the cortical encoding of syntactic representations. We decoded syntactic phrase boundaries directly from brain activity, and evaluated possible modulations of the decoding by the presence of prosodic boundaries. Our findings demonstrate that the presence of a prosodic boundary improves the representation of phrase boundaries, indicating the facilitative role of prosodic cues in processing abstract linguistic features. This study gives neurobiological evidence for the boosting of syntactic processing via interactions with prosody.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Hi-Fi fMRI: High-resolution, fast-sampled and sub-second whole-brain functional MRI at 3T in humans

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a methodological cornerstone of neuroscience. Most studies measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal using echo-planar imaging (EPI), Cartesian sampling, and image reconstruction with a one-to-one correspondence between the number of acquired volumes and reconstructed images. However, EPI schemes are subject to trade-offs between spatial and temporal resolutions. We make strides in overcoming these limitations by measuring BOLD with a gradient recalled echo (GRE) with a 3D radial-spiral phyllotaxis trajectory at a high sampling rate (28.49ms) on standard 3T field strength. The framework enables the reconstruction of 3D signal time courses with whole-brain coverage at simultaneously higher nominal spatial (1mm3) and temporal (up to 250ms) resolutions, as compared to optimized EPI schemes. Additionally, we apply motion correction directly to the k-space raw data, enabling flexible motion-corrected reconstructions; the desired temporal resolution to observe hemodynamic responses can be chosen after scanning. By showing activation in the calcarine sulcus of 20 participants completing an ON-OFF visual paradigm, we demonstrate the reliability of our method for applications in cognitive neuroscience research.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

The influence of auditory attention on rhythmic speech entrainment

Language comprehension relies on integrating words into progressively more complex structures, like phrases and sentences. This hierarchical structure building is reflected in rhythmic neural activity across multiple timescales in E/MEG (Ding et al., 2016, 2017). How does selective attention across levels of the hierarchy influence the expression of these rhythms? We investigated these questions in an EEG study of 72 healthy human volunteers listening to streams of monosyllabic isochronous English words that were either unrelated (scrambled condition) or composed of four-word-sequences building meaningful sentences (sentential condition). Importantly, there were no physical cues between four-word-sentences but boundaries were marked by syntactic structure and thematic role assignment. Participants were divided into three attention groups: from passive listening (passive group) to attending to individual words (word group) or sentences (sentence group). The passive and word group were naive to the sentential structure of the stimulus material, while the sentence group were not. We found significant entrainment at word- and sentence rate across all three groups, with sentence entrainment linked to left middle temporal gyrus and right superior temporal gyrus. Goal-directed attention to words did not enhance word-rate-entrainment suggesting that word entrainment relies on largely automatic mechanisms. Importantly, goal-directed attention to sentences relative to words significantly increased sentence-rate-entrainment over left inferior frontal gyrus. This attentional modulation of rhythmic EEG activity at the sentential level highlights the role of attention in integrating individual words into complex linguistic structures. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTNeural activity is known to entrain to physical characteristics of auditory stimuli. However, entrainment also occurs with structures lacking physical cues but rather require comprehension of the stimulus meaning - for example, entrainment to sentences in speech even without acoustic gaps separating these higher linguistic structures. We investigated how goal-directed attention to low-level (words) and high-level (sentences) linguistic structures influences entrainment strength. Whilst sentence entrainment occurred independently of selective attention, it increased with goal-directed attention towards sentences. Conversely, no such attentional effect was found for word entrainment. While goal-directed attention towards sentences strengthens entrainment, it is no prerequisite for it to occur, suggesting that low attentional effort is required for sentence comprehension, potentially reflecting the importance of speech in humans.

neuroscience↗