Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Krishnan, Ananthanarayan
• Bidelman, Gavin M.
• Smalt, Christopher J.
• Ananthakrishnan, Saradha
• Gandour, Jackson T.

Titel

Relationship between brainstem, cortical and behavioral measures relevant to pitch salience in humans

Ist Teil von

• Neuropsychologia, 2012-10, Vol.50 (12), p.2849-2859

Ort / Verlag

Kidlington: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Neural representation of pitch-relevant information at both the brainstem and cortical levels of processing is influenced by language or music experience. However, the functional roles of brainstem and cortical neural mechanisms in the hierarchical network for language processing, and how they drive and maintain experience-dependent reorganization are not known. In an effort to evaluate the possible interplay between these two levels of pitch processing, we introduce a novel electrophysiological approach to evaluate pitch-relevant neural activity at the brainstem and auditory cortex concurrently. Brainstem frequency-following responses and cortical pitch responses were recorded from participants in response to iterated rippled noise stimuli that varied in stimulus periodicity (pitch salience). A control condition using iterated rippled noise devoid of pitch was employed to ensure pitch specificity of the cortical pitch response. Neural data were compared with behavioral pitch discrimination thresholds. Results showed that magnitudes of neural responses increase systematically and that behavioral pitch discrimination improves with increasing stimulus periodicity, indicating more robust encoding for salient pitch. Absence of cortical pitch response in the control condition confirms that the cortical pitch response is specific to pitch. Behavioral pitch discrimination was better predicted by brainstem and cortical responses together as compared to each separately. The close correspondence between neural and behavioral data suggest that neural correlates of pitch salience that emerge in early, preattentive stages of processing in the brainstem may drive and maintain with high fidelity the early cortical representations of pitch. These neural representations together contain adequate information for the development of perceptual pitch salience. [Display omitted] ► Brainstem and cortical neural responses to pitch compared to behavioral measure. ► Magnitudes of neural responses increase systematically with temporal regularity. ► Behavioral pitch discrimination improves with increasing stimulus periodicity. ► Pitch discrimination well predicted by brainstem and cortical pitch representations. ► Adequate neural information available for development of perceptual pitch salience.