Abstract
Using positron emission tomography (PET), we have been studying the relationship between psychophysical performance and cortical activation during auditory discrimination tasks. In one experiment, we studied normal hearing listeners who had markedly different perceptual performance on a battery of auditory discrimination tasks. Changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were measured while subjects discriminated changes in a tonal sequence or a temporally analogous syllable sequence. The results showed that behavioral performance was correlated with cortical activation in auditory sensory areas as well as cognitive areas related to attention and memory, depending on the demands of the task. To evaluate further whether attention to specific features of complex auditory signals influences the recruitment of cognitive processing areas of the cortex, we studied changes in rCBF when subjects attended to different features of a 1-octave band signal that varied in spectral envelope frequency (i.e., ripple frequency) or carrier frequency. The results showed that when subjects attended to ripple frequency relative to carrier frequency, activation in the thalamus increased. Moreover, when they discriminated ripple frequency in a low-carrier versus a high-carrier frequency, there was increased activation in the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is known to be involved in attention function.
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