Selective prestimulus activity within auditory cortex supporting perceptual decisions

Activity: Talk or presentationPoster presentationscience to science / art to art

Description

Increasing evidence shows that top-down neural activity carries feature-specific information that serves predictive processing of sensory input. In the auditory modality we recently demonstrated automatic, anticipatory carrier-frequency specific preactivations of upcoming pure tone events in a predictable context. Expanding on this, the current study aims to investigate to which extend behavioral decisions might be facilitated by such selective anticipatory predictions. For this purpose we developed a new paradigm, in which an amplitude modulation had to be detected within a compound two-tone sound. Participants had to react as fast as possible with a button response, indicating which one of the two tones contained the modulation. The selective expectation of the target (modulated) tone was manipulated using informative and uninformative visual cues. Using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a region-of-interest (ROI) approach in source space, we were able to classify target tones during a prestimulus interval from brain activity within auditory cortical regions. Importantly, using the same approach within a motor ROI, to rule out the possibility that these findings are the result of mere volume conduction, yielded no significant effects. This supports our interpretation that very fine-tuned auditory representations of a target sound can be induced prior to its onset by a valid visual cue. Furthermore we show that prestimulus decoding accuracies correlate with behavioral task performance, which indicates that selective anticipatory predictions serve to facilitate perceptual decisions. Overall our results strengthen the current presumptions for predictive processing in the auditory modality and illustrate how these predictions can promote behavioral task performance.
Period22 Oct 2020
Event titleAPAN 2020 - Advances and Perspectives in Auditory Neuroscience
Event typeOnline-Conference
LocationUnited StatesShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • correlates of auditory behavior/perception
  • hierarchical sensory organization
  • neural coding