Abstract
Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that sounds can be discriminated due to living-related or man-made-related characteristics and involve different brain regions. However, these studies have mainly provided source space analyses, which offer simple maps of activated brain regions but do not explain how regions of a distributed system are functionally organized under a specific task. In the present study, we aimed to further examine the functional connectivity of the auditory processing pathway across different categories of non-speech sounds in healthy adults, by means of MEG. Our analyses demonstrated significant activation and interconnection differences between living and man-made object sounds, in the prefrontal areas, anterior-superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and supramarginal gyrus (SMG), occurring within 80–120 ms post-stimulus interval. Current findings replicated previous ones, in that other regions beyond the auditory cortex are involved during auditory processing. According to the functional connectivity analysis, differential brain networks across the categories exist, which proposes that sound category discrimination processing relies on distinct cortical networks, a notion that has been strongly argued in the literature also in relation to the visual system.
Highlights
Current knowledge on neuronal networks underlying auditory perception remains fragmentary, despite the fact that audition has been extensively studied (Zatorre et al, 2002)
The peak of the current cluster was located in the anterior part of the right temporal cortex, in the most dorsal area of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) (x = 43, y = 14, z = −29; F(1, 20) = 13.1, cluster size = 3128, p < 0.001 Family Wise Error (FWE) corrected at cluster level)
A second cluster was located in the right inferior parietal lobe, with the peak in the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) (coordinates: x = 56, y = −27, z = 27; F(1, 20) = 12.80, cluster size = 513, p < 0.001 FWE corrected at cluster level)
Summary
Current knowledge on neuronal networks underlying auditory perception remains fragmentary, despite the fact that audition has been extensively studied (Zatorre et al, 2002). Following the “what” pathway, the physical characteristics of the sound stimulus are initially encoded in the primary and secondary auditory cortex, along with their associative areas, prior to their integration into a more abstract representation (Griffiths and Warren, 2004; Bregman, 2017). Within this pathway, the processing of auditory information seems. Left temporal lesion or left fronto-temporal ischemia have caused agnosia restricted to environmental sounds (Clarke et al, 2000) It should be emphasized though, that single-case studies of brainlesioned patients are very heterogeneous and they cannot provide a detailed model of cortical sound processing
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