Perceptual awareness of near-threshold tones scales gradually with auditory cortex activity and pupil dilation.

Negative-going responses in sensory cortex co-vary with perceptual awareness of sensory stimuli. Given that this awareness negativity has also been observed for undetected stimuli, some have challenged its role for perception. To address this question, we combined magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography, and pupillometry to study how sustained attention and response criterion affect the auditory awareness negativity.

Isolating Neural Signatures of Conscious Speech Perception with a No-Report Sine-Wave Speech Paradigm.

Identifying neural correlates of conscious perception is a fundamental endeavor of cognitive neuroscience. Most studies so far have focused on visual awareness along with trial-by-trial reports of task-relevant stimuli, which can confound neural measures of perceptual awareness with postperceptual processing. Here, we used a three-phase sine-wave speech paradigm that dissociated between conscious speech perception and task relevance while recording EEG in humans of both sexes.

A role for retro-splenial cortex in the task-related P3 network.

Objective: The P3 is an event-related response observed in relation to task-relevant sensory events. Despite its ubiquitous presence, the neural generators of the P3 are controversial and not well identified.

Methods: We compared source analysis of combined magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) data with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simulation studies to better understand the sources of the P3 in an auditory oddball paradigm.

Laminar specificity of the auditory perceptual awareness negativity: A biophysical modeling study.

How perception of sensory stimuli emerges from brain activity is a fundamental question of neuroscience. To date, two disparate lines of research have examined this question. On one hand, human neuroimaging studies have helped us understand the large-scale brain dynamics of perception.

A role for retro-splenial cortex in the task-related P3 network.

Objective: The P3 is an event-related response observed in relation to task-relevant sensory events. Despite its ubiquitous presence, the neural generators of the P3 are controversial and not well identified.

Methods: We compared source analysis of combined magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) data with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simulation studies to better understand the sources of the P3 in an auditory oddball paradigm.

Laminar Specificity of the Auditory Perceptual Awareness Negativity: A Biophysical Modeling Study.

Unlabelled: How perception of sensory stimuli emerges from brain activity is a fundamental question of neuroscience. To date, two disparate lines of research have examined this question. On one hand, human neuroimaging studies have helped us understand the large-scale brain dynamics of perception.

FORUM: Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics.

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Listening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place outside of the laboratory in everyday settings (e.

Cortical networks for auditory detection with and without informational masking: Task effects and implications for conscious perception.

Ambiguous and masked stimuli have been used to study conscious perception by comparing neural activity during different percepts of identical physical stimuli. One limitation of this approach is that it typically requires a reporting task that may engage neural processes beyond those required for conscious perception. Here, we explored potential fMRI correlates of auditory conscious perception with and without overt report.

iELVis: An open source MATLAB toolbox for localizing and visualizing human intracranial electrode data.

Background: Intracranial electrical recordings (iEEG) and brain stimulation (iEBS) are invaluable human neuroscience methodologies. However, the value of such data is often unrealized as many laboratories lack tools for localizing electrodes relative to anatomy. To remedy this, we have developed a MATLAB toolbox for intracranial electrode localization and visualization, iELVis.

A roadmap for the study of conscious audition and its neural basis.

How and which aspects of neural activity give rise to subjective perceptual experience-i.e. conscious perception-is a fundamental question of neuroscience.

Neural Correlates of Auditory Perceptual Awareness and Release from Informational Masking Recorded Directly from Human Cortex: A Case Study.

In complex acoustic environments, even salient supra-threshold sounds sometimes go unperceived, a phenomenon known as informational masking. The neural basis of informational masking (and its release) has not been well-characterized, particularly outside auditory cortex. We combined electrocorticography in a neurosurgical patient undergoing invasive epilepsy monitoring with trial-by-trial perceptual reports of isochronous target-tone streams embedded in random multi-tone maskers.

Lateralization and Binaural Interaction of Middle-Latency and Late-Brainstem Components of the Auditory Evoked Response.

We used magnetoencephalography to examine lateralization and binaural interaction of the middle-latency and late-brainstem components of the auditory evoked response (the MLR and SN10, respectively). Click stimuli were presented either monaurally, or binaurally with left- or right-leading interaural time differences (ITDs). While early MLR components, including the N19 and P30, were larger for monaural stimuli presented contralaterally (by approximately 30 and 36 % in the left and right hemispheres, respectively), later components, including the N40 and P50, were larger ipsilaterally.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging confirms forward suppression for rapidly alternating sounds in human auditory cortex but not in the inferior colliculus.

Forward suppression at the level of the auditory cortex has been suggested to subserve auditory stream segregation. Recent results in non-streaming stimulation contexts have indicated that forward suppression can also be observed in the inferior colliculus; whether this holds for streaming-related contexts remains unclear. Here, we used cardiac-gated fMRI to examine forward suppression in the inferior colliculus (and the rest of the human auditory pathway) in response to canonical streaming stimuli (rapid tone sequences comprised of either one repetitive tone or two alternating tones).

Does the mismatch negativity operate on a consciously accessible memory trace?

The extent to which the contents of short-term memory are consciously accessible is a fundamental question of cognitive science. In audition, short-term memory is often studied via the mismatch negativity (MMN), a change-related component of the auditory evoked response that is elicited by violations of otherwise regular stimulus sequences. The prevailing functional view of the MMN is that it operates on preattentive and even preconscious stimulus representations.

Interaction of streaming and attention in human auditory cortex.

Serially presented tones are sometimes segregated into two perceptually distinct streams. An ongoing debate is whether this basic streaming phenomenon reflects automatic processes or requires attention focused to the stimuli. Here, we examined the influence of focused attention on streaming-related activity in human auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Utility of foramen ovale electrodes in mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

Objectives: To determine the ability of foramen ovale electrodes (FOEs) to localize epileptogenic foci after inconclusive noninvasive investigations in patients with suspected mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE).

Methods: We identified patients with medically intractable epilepsy who had undergone FOE investigation for initial invasive monitoring at our institution between 2005 and 2012. Indications for initiating FOE investigation were grouped into four categories: (1) bilateral anterior temporal ictal activity on scalp electroencephalography (EEG), (2) unclear laterality of scalp EEG onset due to muscle artifact or significant delay following clinical manifestation, (3) discordance between ictal and interictal discharges, and (4) investigation of a specific anatomic abnormality or competing putative focus.

Functional imaging of auditory scene analysis.

Our auditory system is constantly faced with the task of decomposing the complex mixture of sound arriving at the ears into perceptually independent streams constituting accurate representations of individual sound sources. This decomposition, termed auditory scene analysis, is critical for both survival and communication, and is thought to underlie both speech and music perception. The neural underpinnings of auditory scene analysis have been studied utilizing invasive experiments with animal models as well as non-invasive (MEG, EEG, and fMRI) and invasive (intracranial EEG) studies conducted with human listeners.

Time is of the essence for auditory scene analysis.

Using computational models and stimuli that resemble natural acoustic signals, auditory scientists explore how we segregate competing streams of sound.

Speech-specific tuning of neurons in human superior temporal gyrus.

How the brain extracts words from auditory signals is an unanswered question. We recorded approximately 150 single and multi-units from the left anterior superior temporal gyrus of a patient during multiple auditory experiments. Against low background activity, 45% of units robustly fired to particular spoken words with little or no response to pure tones, noise-vocoded speech, or environmental sounds.

Dissociation of detection and discrimination of pure tones following bilateral lesions of auditory cortex.

It is well known that damage to the peripheral auditory system causes deficits in tone detection as well as pitch and loudness perception across a wide range of frequencies. However, the extent to which to which the auditory cortex plays a critical role in these basic aspects of spectral processing, especially with regard to speech, music, and environmental sound perception, remains unclear. Recent experiments indicate that primary auditory cortex is necessary for the normally-high perceptual acuity exhibited by humans in pure-tone frequency discrimination.

Individualized localization and cortical surface-based registration of intracranial electrodes.

In addition to its widespread clinical use, the intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) is increasingly being employed as a tool to map the neural correlates of normal cognitive function as well as for developing neuroprosthetics. Despite recent advances, and unlike other established brain-mapping modalities (e.g.

Widespread Brain Areas Engaged during a Classical Auditory Streaming Task Revealed by Intracranial EEG.

The auditory system must constantly decompose the complex mixture of sound arriving at the ear into perceptually independent streams constituting accurate representations of individual sources in the acoustic environment. How the brain accomplishes this task is not well understood. The present study combined a classic behavioral paradigm with direct cortical recordings from neurosurgical patients with epilepsy in order to further describe the neural correlates of auditory streaming.