Invariance to background noise as a signature of non-primary auditory cortex

TitleInvariance to background noise as a signature of non-primary auditory cortex
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsKell, AJE, McDermott, JH
JournalNature Communications
Volume10
Issue1
Date Published09/2019
Abstract

Despite well-established anatomical differences between primary and non-primary auditory cortex, the associated representational transformations have remained elusive. Here we show that primary and non-primary auditory cortex are differentiated by their invariance to real-world background noise. We measured fMRI responses to natural sounds presented in isolation and in real-world noise, quantifying invariance as the correlation between the two responses for individual voxels. Non-primary areas were substantially more noise-invariant than primary areas. This primary-nonprimary difference occurred both for speech and non-speech sounds and was unaffected by a concurrent demanding visual task, suggesting that the observed invariance is not specific to speech processing and is robust to inattention. The difference was most pronounced for real-world background noise – both primary and non-primary areas were relatively robust to simple types of synthetic noise. Our results suggest a general representational transformation between auditory cortical stages, illustrating a representational consequence of hierarchical organization in the auditory system.

URLhttp://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11710-y
DOI10.1038/s41467-019-11710-y
Short TitleNat Commun

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