bioRxiv Science⌕ Search

Biology subjects

Pasley, B. N.

Publications and source records attributed to Pasley, B. N..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Encoding and decoding analysis of music perception using intracranial EEG

Music perception engages multiple brain regions, however the neural dynamics of this core human experience remains elusive. We applied predictive models to intracranial EEG data from 29 patients listening to a Pink Floyd song. We investigated the relationship between the song spectrogram and the elicited high-frequency activity (70-150Hz), a marker of local neural activity. Encoding models characterized the spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) of each electrode and decoding models estimated the population-level song representation. Both methods confirmed a crucial role of the right superior temporal gyri (STG) in music perception. A component analysis on STRF coefficients highlighted overlapping neural populations tuned to specific musical elements (vocals, lead guitar, rhythm). An ablation analysis on decoding models revealed the presence of unique musical information concentrated in the right STG and more spatially distributed in the left hemisphere. Lastly, we provided the first song reconstruction decoded from human neural activity.

neuroscience↗

Imagined speech can be decoded from low- and cross-frequency features in perceptual space

Reconstructing intended speech from neural activity using brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) holds great promises for people with severe speech production deficits. While decoding overt speech has progressed, decoding imagined speech have met limited success, mainly because the associated neural signals are weak and variable hence difficult to decode by learning algorithms. Using three electrocorticography datasets totalizing 1444 electrodes from 13 patients who performed overt and imagined speech production tasks, and based on recent theories of speech neural processing, we extracted consistent and specific neural features usable for future BCIs, and assessed their performance to discriminate speech items in articulatory, phonetic, vocalic, and semantic representation spaces. While high-frequency activity provided the best signal for overt speech, both low- and higher-frequency power and local cross-frequency contributed to successful imagined speech decoding, in particular in phonetic and vocalic, i.e. perceptual, spaces. These findings demonstrate that low-frequency power and cross-frequency dynamics contain key information for imagined speech decoding, and that exploring perceptual spaces offers a promising avenue for future imagined speech BCIs.

neuroscience↗

Coherence-based spectro-spatial fillters for stimulus features prediction from electrocorticographic recordings.

The traditional approach in neuroscience relies on encoding models where brain responses to different stimuli are related to the latter to establish reproducible dependencies. To reduce neuronal and experimental noise, brain signals are usually averaged across trials to detect reliable and coherent brain activity. However, neural representations of stimulus features can be spread over time, frequency, and space, motivating the use of alternative methods that relate stimulus features to brain responses. We propose a Coherence-based spectro-spatial filter method that reconstructs stimulus features from intracortical brain signals. The proposed method models trials of an experiment as realizations of a random process and extracts patterns that are common across brain signals and the presented stimuli. These patterns, originating from different recording sites, are then combined (spatial filtering) to form a final prediction. Our results from three different cognitive tasks (motor movements, speech perception and speech production), concur to show that the proposed method significantly improves the ability to predict stimulus features over traditional methods such as multilinear regression with distributed lags and artificial neural networks. Furthermore, analyses of the model parameters show anatomical discriminability for execution of different motor movements. This anatomical discriminability is also observed in the perception and production of different words. These features could be exploited in the design of neuroprosthesis, as well as for exploring normal brain functioning.

neuroscience↗

Neural Encoding of Auditory Features during Music Perception and Imagery: Insight into the Brain of a Piano Player

It remains unclear how the human cortex represents spectrotemporal sound features during auditory imagery, and how this representation compares to auditory perception. To assess this, we recorded electrocorticographic signals from an epileptic patient with proficient music ability in two conditions. First, the participant played two piano pieces on an electronic piano with the sound volume of the digital keyboard on. Second, the participant replayed the same piano pieces, but without auditory feedback, and the participant was asked to imagine hearing the music in his mind. In both conditions, the sound output of the keyboard was recorded, thus allowing precise time-locking between the neural activity and the spectrotemporal content of the music imagery. For both conditions, we built encoding models to predict high gamma neural activity (70-150Hz) from the spectrogram representation of the recorded sound. We found robust similarities between perception and imagery - in frequency and temporal tuning properties in auditory areas.\n\nAbbreviations

neuroscience↗