Abstract
It is well known that the planum temporale (PT) area in the posterior temporal lobe carries out spectro-temporal analysis of auditory stimuli, which is crucial for speech, for example. There are suggestions that the PT is also involved in auditory attention, specifically in the discrimination and selection of stimuli from the left and right ear. However, direct evidence is missing so far. To examine the role of the PT in auditory attention we asked fourteen participants to complete the Bergen Dichotic Listening Test. In this test two different consonant-vowel syllables (e.g., “ba” and “da”) are presented simultaneously, one to each ear, and participants are asked to verbally report the syllable they heard best or most clearly. Thus attentional selection of a syllable is stimulus-driven. Each participant completed the test three times: after their left and right PT (located with anatomical brain scans) had been stimulated with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), which transiently interferes with normal brain functioning in the stimulated sites, and after sham stimulation, where participants were led to believe they had been stimulated but no rTMS was applied (control). After sham stimulation the typical right ear advantage emerged, that is, participants reported relatively more right than left ear syllables, reflecting a left-hemispheric dominance for language. rTMS over the right but not left PT significantly reduced the right ear advantage. This was the result of participants reporting more left and fewer right ear syllables after right PT stimulation, suggesting there was a leftward shift in stimulus selection. Taken together, our findings point to a new function of the PT in addition to auditory perception: particularly the right PT is involved in stimulus selection and (stimulus-driven), auditory attention.
Highlights
The planum temporale (PT) is located in the superior temporal gyrus just posterior to the primary auditory cortex (Heschl’s gyrus)
First we examined whether there was a difference between positioning the coil over the left and right PT during sham
The aim of the present study was to examine whether the PT is involved in auditory attention and stimulus selection (e.g., [23,27])
Summary
The planum temporale (PT) is located in the superior temporal gyrus just posterior to the primary auditory cortex (Heschl’s gyrus). There are findings suggesting that beyond auditory perception the PT is involved in or modulated by attentional processes [7,8]. As pointed out by Griffiths and Warren [1] and Hashimoto et al [27], there are reports that failed to show an involvement of the PT in attentional processes [32,33,34,35] All these studies used either functional magnetic resonance imaging [27,28,30,31,32], magnetoencephalography [29], or positron emission tomography [7,33,34,35]. One might speculate that because the main function of the PT is spectro-temporal analysis, additional processes like stimulus selection are difficult to detect with neuroimaging, because both result in PT activations
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