Abstract
Although the supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas have been intensely investigated in relation to their motor functions, they are also consistently reported in studies of auditory processing and auditory imagery. This involvement is commonly overlooked, in contrast to lateral premotor and inferior prefrontal areas. We argue here for the engagement of supplementary motor areas across a variety of sound categories, including speech, vocalizations, and music, and we discuss how our understanding of auditory processes in these regions relate to findings and hypotheses from the motor literature. We suggest that supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas play a role in facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound, and in supporting a flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to enable imagery and to guide auditory perception.
Highlights
From Action to Sound The premotor areas of the medial frontal cortex form a central node of the action network
In the context of imagery, estimates of the sensory correlates of candidate actions would be the substrate of the subjective experience of ‘hearing’. This is consistent with the observation that responses in the superior temporal gyrus and in pre-SMA and SMA are both seen in auditory imagery studies [13,69,71], and with evidence linking individual differences in the structure and function of SMA with higher vividness of auditory images [80,81]
The broad evidence for these activations suggests that we in auditory cognitive neuroscience need to conceptualize these regions as part of the functional neuroanatomy of auditory processing, and to account for the variety of listening and imagery contexts in which they are involved
Summary
The supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas have been intensely investigated in relation to their motor functions, they are consistently reported in studies of auditory processing and auditory imagery This involvement is commonly overlooked, in contrast to lateral premotor and inferior prefrontal areas. In this review we address the candidate roles that SMA and pre-SMA play in auditory processing These regions are commonly activated in auditory perceptual and auditory imagery studies, across a wide range of sounds including speech, nonverbal vocalizations, and music [12,13,14,15,16,17]. Because there are no macroanatomical landmarks for the anterior boundary, pre-SMA has been considered to extend to a virtual line passing through the genu of the corpus callosum [11]
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