Auditory Stream Research Articles

Temporal coherence shapes cortical responses to speech mixtures in a ferret cocktail party

Perceptual segregation of complex sounds such as speech and music simultaneously emanating from multiple sources is a remarkable ability that is common in humans and other animals alike. Unlike animal physiological experiments with simplified sounds or human investigations with spatially broad imaging techniques, this study combines insights from animal single-unit recordings with segregation of speech-like sound mixtures. Ferrets are trained to attend to a female voice and detect a target word, both in presence and absence of a concurrent equally salient male voice. Recordings are made in primary and secondary auditory cortical fields, and in frontal cortex. During task performance, representation of the female words becomes enhanced relative to the male in all, but especially in higher cortical regions. Analysis of the temporal and spectral response characteristics during task performance reveals how speech segregation gradually emerges in the auditory cortex. A computational model evaluated on the same voice mixtures replicates and extends these results to different attentional targets (attention to female or male voices). These findings underscore the role of the principle of temporal coherence whereby attention to a target voice binds together all neural responses coherently modulated with the target, thus ultimately forming and extracting a common auditory stream.

Fault diagnosis of driving gear in battery swapping system based on auditory bionics

Rack and pinion drives (RPD) are widely used in battery swapping system (BSS) for electric heavy trucks (EHT), and due to the continuous heavy-load and high-intensity operation, along with the electric erosion, the gears in the RPD are always damaged, which causes unexpected consequences such as downtime or safety incidents. The working conditions of the RPD in BSS include uncertain noises, fluctuant and low speed, which pose steep challenges to accurate fault diagnosis. Considering the auditory resistance of interference, the low-frequency sensitivity of auditory perception, and the auditory saliency mechanism, to leverage the advantages of auditory perceptual mechanism in addressing the above challenges, as the contribution in artificial intelligence, we propose an entire vibration signal processing scheme based on auditory bionics, including some mathematical models for auditory mechanisms. For the application in engineering, the proposed scheme is employed for fault diagnosis of RPD in BSS in unique working conditions. First, adaptive resampling is used to smooth the speed fluctuation, then, Gammatone filters are employed to transform vibration signals to cochleograms, after that, based on auditory stream segregation and selective attention mechanisms, effective frequency channels and salient features are extracted from the cochleograms, besides, to improve the diagnosis accuracy, binaural features are also extracted, finally, based on (sectional) sparse representation and fusion, fault diagnosis is achieved. The effectiveness of the fault diagnosis scheme is demonstrated using a BSS prototype system.

Does music training improve inhibition control in children? A systematic review and meta-analysis

Inhibition control is an essential executive function during children's development, underpinning self-regulation and the acquisition of social and language abilities. This executive function is intensely engaged in music training while learning an instrument, a complex multisensory task requiring monitoring motor performance and auditory stream prioritization. This novel meta-analysis examined music-based training on inhibition control in children. Records from 1980 to 2023 yielded 22 longitudinal studies with controls (N = 1734), including 8 RCTs and 14 others. A random-effects meta-analysis showed that music training improved inhibition control (moderate-to-large effect size) in the RCTs and the superset of twenty-two longitudinal studies (small-to-moderate effect size). Music training plays a privileged role compared to other activities (sports, visual arts, drama) in improving children's executive functioning, with a particular effect on inhibition control. We recommend music training for complementing education and as a clinical tool focusing on inhibition control remediation (e.g., in autism and ADHD).

Spacetime trajectories as overlapping rhythms

The navigation of two-dimensional spaces by rhythmic patterns on two buttons is investigated. It is shown how direction and speed of a moving object can be controlled with discrete commands consisting of duplets or triplets of taps, whose rate is proportional to one of two orthogonal velocity components. The imparted commands generate polyrhythms and polytempi that can be used to monitor the object movement by perceptual streaming. Tacking back and forth must be used to make progress along certain directions, similarly to sailing a boat upwind. The proposed rhythmic velocity-control technique is tested with a target-following task. Users effectively learn the tapping control actions, and they can keep a relatively small distance from a moving target. They can potentially rely on overlapping auditory rhythmic streams to compensate for temporary deprivation of visual position of the controlled object. The interface is minimal and symmetric, and can be adapted to different sensing and display devices, exploiting the symmetry of the human body and the ability to follow two concurrent rhythmic streams.

Cortical tracking of language structures: Modality-dependent and independent responses

ObjectivesThe mental parsing of linguistic hierarchy is crucial for language comprehension, and while there is growing interest in the cortical tracking of auditory speech, the neurophysiological substrates for tracking written language are still unclear. MethodsWe recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) responses from participants exposed to auditory and visual streams of either random syllables or tri-syllabic real words. Using a frequency-tagging approach, we analyzed the neural representations of physically presented (i.e., syllables) and mentally constructed (i.e., words) linguistic units and compared them between the two sensory modalities. ResultsWe found that tracking syllables is partially modality dependent, with anterior and posterior scalp regions more involved in the tracking of spoken and written syllables, respectively. The cortical tracking of spoken and written words instead was found to involve a shared anterior region to a similar degree, suggesting a modality-independent process for word tracking. ConclusionOur study suggests that basic linguistic features are represented in a sensory modality-specific manner, while more abstract ones are modality-unspecific during the online processing of continuous language input. SignificanceThe current methodology may be utilized in future research to examine the development of reading skills, especially the deficiencies in fluent reading among those with dyslexia.

Dissonant music engages early visual processing

The neuroscientific examination of music processing in audio-visual contexts offers a valuable framework to assess how auditory information influences the emotional encoding of visual information. Using fMRI during naturalistic film viewing, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of music on valence inferences during mental state attribution. Thirty-eight participants watched the same short-film accompanied by systematically controlled consonant or dissonant music. Subjects were instructed to think about the main character's intentions. The results revealed that increasing levels of dissonance led to more negatively valenced inferences, displaying the profound emotional impact of musical dissonance. Crucially, at the neuroscientific level and despite music being the sole manipulation, dissonance evoked the response of the primary visual cortex (V1). Functional/effective connectivity analysis showed a stronger coupling between the auditory ventral stream (AVS) and V1 in response to tonal dissonance and demonstrated the modulation of early visual processing via top-down feedback inputs from the AVS to V1. These V1 signal changes indicate the influence of high-level contextual representations associated with tonal dissonance on early visual cortices, serving to facilitate the emotional interpretation of visual information. Our results highlight the significance of employing systematically controlled music, which can isolate emotional valence from the arousal dimension, to elucidate the brain's sound-to-meaning interface and its distributive crossmodal effects on early visual encoding during naturalistic film viewing.

Infant attention to rhythmic audiovisual synchrony is modulated by stimulus properties.

Musical interactions are a common and multimodal part of an infant's daily experiences. Infants hear their parents sing while watching their lips move and see their older siblings dance along to music playing over the radio. Here, we explore whether 8- to 12-month-old infants associate musical rhythms they hear with synchronous visual displays by tracking their dynamic visual attention to matched and mismatched displays. Visual attention was measured using eye-tracking while they attended to a screen displaying two videos of a finger tapping at different speeds. These videos were presented side by side while infants listened to an auditory rhythm (high or low pitch) synchronized with one of the two videos. Infants attended more to the low-pitch trials than to the high-pitch trials but did not display a preference for attending to the synchronous hand over the asynchronous hand within trials. Exploratory evidence, however, suggests that tempo, pitch, and rhythmic complexity interactively engage infants' visual attention to a tapping hand, especially when that hand is aligned with the auditory stimulus. For example, when the rhythm was complex and the auditory stimulus was low in pitch, infants attended to the fast hand more when it aligned with the auditory stream than to misaligned trials. These results suggest that the audiovisual integration in rhythmic non-speech contexts is influenced by stimulus properties.

Neural correlates of musical timbre: an ALE meta-analysis of neuroimaging data.

Timbre is a central aspect of music that allows listeners to identify musical sounds and conveys musical emotion, but also allows for the recognition of actions and is an important structuring property of music. The former functions are known to be implemented in a ventral auditory stream in processing musical timbre. While the latter functions are commonly attributed to areas in a dorsal auditory processing stream in other musical domains, its involvement in musical timbre processing is so far unknown. To investigate if musical timbre processing involves both dorsal and ventral auditory pathways, we carried out an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of 18 experiments from 17 published neuroimaging studies on musical timbre perception. We identified consistent activations in Brodmann areas (BA) 41, 42, and 22 in the bilateral transverse temporal gyri, the posterior superior temporal gyri and planum temporale, in BA 40 of the bilateral inferior parietal lobe, in BA 13 in the bilateral posterior Insula, and in BA 13 and 22 in the right anterior insula and superior temporal gyrus. The vast majority of the identified regions are associated with the dorsal and ventral auditory processing streams. We therefore propose to frame the processing of musical timbre in a dual-stream model. Moreover, the regions activated in processing timbre show similarities to the brain regions involved in processing several other fundamental aspects of music, indicating possible shared neural bases of musical timbre and other musical domains.

Clutter resilience via auditory stream segregation in echolocating greater mouse-eared bats.

Bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt in darkness, and must in that process segregate target echoes from unwanted clutter echoes. Bats may do this by approaching a target at steep angles relative to the plane of the background, utilizing their directional transmission and receiving systems to minimize clutter from background objects, but it remains unknown how bats negotiate clutter that cannot be spatially avoided. Here, we tested the hypothesis that when movement no longer offers spatial release, echolocating bats mitigate clutter by calling at lower source levels and longer call intervals to ease auditory streaming. We trained five greater mouse-eared bats (Myotis myotis) to land on a spherical loudspeaker with two microphones attached. We used a phantom-echo setup, where the loudspeaker/target transmitted phantom clutter echoes by playing back the bats' own calls at time delays of 1, 3 and 5 ms with a virtual target strength 7 dB higher than the physical target. We show that the bats successfully landed on the target, irrespective of the clutter echo delays. Rather than decreasing their source levels, the bats used similar source level distributions in clutter and control trials. Similarly, the bats did not increase their call intervals, but instead used the same distribution of call intervals across control and clutter trials. These observations reject our hypothesis, leading us to conclude that bats display great resilience to clutter via short auditory integration times and acute auditory stream segregation rather than via biosonar adjustments.

Temporal Coherence Shapes Cortical Responses to Speech Mixtures in a Ferret Cocktail Party.

Segregation of complex sounds such as speech, music and animal vocalizations as they simultaneously emanate from multiple sources (referred to as the "cocktail party problem") is a remarkable ability that is common in humans and animals alike. The neural underpinnings of this process have been extensively studied behaviorally and physiologically in non-human animals primarily with simplified sounds (tones and noise sequences). In humans, segregation experiments utilizing more complex speech mixtures are common; but physiological experiments have relied on EEG/MEG/ECoG recordings that sample activity from thousands of neurons, often obscuring the detailed processes that give rise to the observed segregation. The present study combines the insights from animal single-unit physiology with segregation of speech-like mixtures. Ferrets were trained to attend to a female voice and detect a target word, both in presence or absence of a concurrent, equally salient male voice. Single neuron recordings were obtained from primary and secondary ferret auditory cortical fields, as well as frontal cortex. During task performance, representation of the female words became more enhanced relative to those of the (distractor) male in all cortical regions, especially in the higher auditory cortical field. Analysis of the temporal and spectral response characteristics during task performance reveals how speech segregation gradually emerges in the auditory cortex. A computational model evaluated on the same voice mixtures replicates and extends these results to different attentional targets (attention to female or male voices). These findings are consistent with the temporal coherence theory whereby attention to a target voice anchors neural activity in cortical networks hence binding together channels that are coherently temporally-modulated with the target, and ultimately forming a common auditory stream.

A hierarchy of processing complexity and timescales for natural sounds in human auditory cortex.

Efficient behavior is supported by humans' ability to rapidly recognize acoustically distinct sounds as members of a common category. Within auditory cortex, there are critical unanswered questions regarding the organization and dynamics of sound categorization. Here, we performed intracerebral recordings in the context of epilepsy surgery as 20 patient-participants listened to natural sounds. We built encoding models to predict neural responses using features of these sounds extracted from different layers within a sound-categorization deep neural network (DNN). This approach yielded highly accurate models of neural responses throughout auditory cortex. The complexity of a cortical site's representation (measured by the depth of the DNN layer that produced the best model) was closely related to its anatomical location, with shallow, middle, and deep layers of the DNN associated with core (primary auditory cortex), lateral belt, and parabelt regions, respectively. Smoothly varying gradients of representational complexity also existed within these regions, with complexity increasing along a posteromedial-to-anterolateral direction in core and lateral belt, and along posterior-to-anterior and dorsal-to-ventral dimensions in parabelt. When we estimated the time window over which each recording site integrates information, we found shorter integration windows in core relative to lateral belt and parabelt. Lastly, we found a relationship between the length of the integration window and the complexity of information processing within core (but not lateral belt or parabelt). These findings suggest hierarchies of timescales and processing complexity, and their interrelationship, represent a functional organizational principle of the auditory stream that underlies our perception of complex, abstract auditory information.

An auditory brain-computer interface based on selective attention to multiple tone streams.

In this study, we attempted to improve brain-computer interface (BCI) systems by means of auditory stream segregation in which alternately presented tones are perceived as sequences of various different tones (streams). A 3-class BCI using three tone sequences, which were perceived as three different tone streams, was investigated and evaluated. Each presented musical tone was generated by a software synthesizer. Eleven subjects took part in the experiment. Stimuli were presented to each user's right ear. Subjects were requested to attend to one of three streams and to count the number of target stimuli in the attended stream. In addition, 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) and two-channel electrooculogram (EOG) signals were recorded from participants with a sampling frequency of 1000 Hz. The measured EEG data were classified based on Riemannian geometry to detect the object of the subject's selective attention. P300 activity was elicited by the target stimuli in the segregated tone streams. In five out of eleven subjects, P300 activity was elicited only by the target stimuli included in the attended stream. In a 10-fold cross validation test, a classification accuracy over 80% for five subjects and over 75% for nine subjects was achieved. For subjects whose accuracy was lower than 75%, either the P300 was also elicited for nonattended streams or the amplitude of P300 was small. It was concluded that the number of selected BCI systems based on auditory stream segregation can be increased to three classes, and these classes can be detected by a single ear without the aid of any visual modality.

Effects of Temporal Processing on Speech-in-Noise Perception in Middle-Aged Adults.

Auditory temporal processing is a vital component of auditory stream segregation, or the process in which complex sounds are separated and organized into perceptually meaningful objects. Temporal processing can degrade prior to hearing loss, and is suggested to be a contributing factor to difficulties with speech-in-noise perception in normal-hearing listeners. The current study tested this hypothesis in middle-aged adults-an under-investigated cohort, despite being the age group where speech-in-noise difficulties are first reported. In 76 participants, three mechanisms of temporal processing were measured: peripheral auditory nerve function using electrocochleography, subcortical encoding of periodic speech cues (i.e., fundamental frequency; F0) using the frequency following response, and binaural sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) using a dichotic frequency modulation detection task. Two measures of speech-in-noise perception were administered to explore how contributions of temporal processing may be mediated by different sensory demands present in the speech perception task. This study supported the hypothesis that temporal coding deficits contribute to speech-in-noise difficulties in middle-aged listeners. Poorer speech-in-noise perception was associated with weaker subcortical F0 encoding and binaural TFS sensitivity, but in different contexts, highlighting that diverse aspects of temporal processing are differentially utilized based on speech-in-noise task characteristics.

Perceptually salient differences in a species recognition cue do not promote auditory streaming in eastern grey treefrogs (Hyla versicolor).

Auditory streaming underlies a receiver's ability to organize complex mixtures of auditory input into distinct perceptual "streams" that represent different sound sources in the environment. During auditory streaming, sounds produced by the same source are integrated through time into a single, coherent auditory stream that is perceptually segregated from other concurrent sounds. Based on human psychoacoustic studies, one hypothesis regarding auditory streaming is that any sufficiently salient perceptual difference may lead to stream segregation. Here, we used the eastern grey treefrog, Hyla versicolor, to test this hypothesis in the context of vocal communication in a non-human animal. In this system, females choose their mate based on perceiving species-specific features of a male's pulsatile advertisement calls in social environments (choruses) characterized by mixtures of overlapping vocalizations. We employed an experimental paradigm from human psychoacoustics to design interleaved pulsatile sequences (ABAB…) that mimicked key features of the species' advertisement call, and in which alternating pulses differed in pulse rise time, which is a robust species recognition cue in eastern grey treefrogs. Using phonotaxis assays, we found no evidence that perceptually salient differences in pulse rise time promoted the segregation of interleaved pulse sequences into distinct auditory streams. These results do not support the hypothesis that any perceptually salient acoustic difference can be exploited as a cue for stream segregation in all species. We discuss these findings in the context of cues used for species recognition and auditory streaming.

Preliminary Evidence for Global Properties in Human Listeners During Natural Auditory Scene Perception.

Theories of auditory and visual scene analysis suggest the perception of scenes relies on the identification and segregation of objects within it, resembling a detail-oriented processing style. However, a more global process may occur while analyzing scenes, which has been evidenced in the visual domain. It is our understanding that a similar line of research has not been explored in the auditory domain; therefore, we evaluated the contributions of high-level global and low-level acoustic information to auditory scene perception. An additional aim was to increase the field's ecological validity by using and making available a new collection of high-quality auditory scenes. Participants rated scenes on 8 global properties (e.g., open vs. enclosed) and an acoustic analysis evaluated which low-level features predicted the ratings. We submitted the acoustic measures and average ratings of the global properties to separate exploratory factor analyses (EFAs). The EFA of the acoustic measures revealed a seven-factor structure explaining 57% of the variance in the data, while the EFA of the global property measures revealed a two-factor structure explaining 64% of the variance in the data. Regression analyses revealed each global property was predicted by at least one acoustic variable (R2 = 0.33-0.87). These findings were extended using deep neural network models where we examined correlations between human ratings of global properties and deep embeddings of two computational models: an object-based model and a scene-based model. The results support that participants' ratings are more strongly explained by a global analysis of the scene setting, though the relationship between scene perception and auditory perception is multifaceted, with differing correlation patterns evident between the two models. Taken together, our results provide evidence for the ability to perceive auditory scenes from a global perspective. Some of the acoustic measures predicted ratings of global scene perception, suggesting representations of auditory objects may be transformed through many stages of processing in the ventral auditory stream, similar to what has been proposed in the ventral visual stream. These findings and the open availability of our scene collection will make future studies on perception, attention, and memory for natural auditory scenes possible.

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Sonification for Time-series Data Exploration

Astronomy is a discipline primarily reliant on visual data. However, alternative data representation techniques are being explored, in particular “sonification,” namely, the representation of data into sound. While there is increasing interest in the astronomical community in using sonification in research and educational contexts, its full potential is still to be explored. This study measured the performance of astronomers and nonastronomers to detect a transit-like feature in time-series data (i.e., light curves), which were represented visually or auditorily, adopting different data-to-sound mappings. We also assessed the bias that participants exhibited in the different conditions. We simulated the data of 160 light curves with different signal-to-noise ratios. We represented them as visual plots or auditory streams with different sound parameters to represent brightness: pitch, duration, or the redundant duration and pitch. We asked the participants to identify the presence of transit-like features in these four conditions in a session that included an equal number of stimuli with and without transit-like features. With auditory stimuli, participants detected transits with performances above the chance level. However, visual stimuli led to overall better performances compared to auditory stimuli and astronomers outperformed nonastronomers. Visualisations led to a conservative response bias (reluctance to answer “yes, there is a transit”), whereas sonifications led to more liberal responses (proneness to respond “yes, there is a transit”). Overall, this study contributes to understanding how different representations (visual or auditory) and sound mappings (pitch, duration, and duration and pitch) of time-series data affect detection accuracy and biases.

Attention to audiovisual speech shapes neural processing through feedback-feedforward loops between different nodes of the speech network.

Selective attention-related top-down modulation plays a significant role in separating relevant speech from irrelevant background speech when vocal attributes separating concurrent speakers are small and continuously evolving. Electrophysiological studies have shown that such top-down modulation enhances neural tracking of attended speech. Yet, the specific cortical regions involved remain unclear due to the limited spatial resolution of most electrophysiological techniques. To overcome such limitations, we collected both electroencephalography (EEG) (high temporal resolution) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (high spatial resolution), while human participants selectively attended to speakers in audiovisual scenes containing overlapping cocktail party speech. To utilise the advantages of the respective techniques, we analysed neural tracking of speech using the EEG data and performed representational dissimilarity-based EEG-fMRI fusion. We observed that attention enhanced neural tracking and modulated EEG correlates throughout the latencies studied. Further, attention-related enhancement of neural tracking fluctuated in predictable temporal profiles. We discuss how such temporal dynamics could arise from a combination of interactions between attention and prediction as well as plastic properties of the auditory cortex. EEG-fMRI fusion revealed attention-related iterative feedforward-feedback loops between hierarchically organised nodes of the ventral auditory object related processing stream. Our findings support models where attention facilitates dynamic neural changes in the auditory cortex, ultimately aiding discrimination of relevant sounds from irrelevant ones while conserving neural resources.

Perception of temporal synchrony not a prerequisite for multisensory integration

Temporal alignment is often viewed as the most essential cue the brain can use to integrate information from across sensory modalities. However, the importance of conscious perception of synchrony to multisensory integration is a controversial topic. Conversely, the influence of cross-modal incongruence of higher level stimulus features such as phonetics on temporal processing is poorly understood. To explore the nuances of this relationship between temporal processing and multisensory integration, we presented 101 participants (ranging from 19 to 73 years of age) with stimuli designed to elicit the McGurk/MacDonald illusion (either matched or mismatched pairs of phonemes and visemes) with varying degrees of stimulus onset asynchrony between the visual and auditory streams. We asked them to indicate which syllable they perceived and whether the video and audio were synchronized on each trial. We found that participants often experienced the illusion despite not perceiving the stimuli as synchronous, and the same phonetic incongruence that produced the illusion also led to significant interference in simultaneity judgments. These findings challenge the longstanding assumption that perception of synchrony is a prerequisite to multisensory integration, support a more flexible view of multisensory integration, and suggest a complex, reciprocal relationship between temporal and multisensory processing.

Specificity of Motor Contributions to Auditory Statistical Learning.

Statistical learning is the ability to extract patterned information from continuous sensory signals. Recent evidence suggests that auditory-motor mechanisms play an important role in auditory statistical learning from speech signals. The question remains whether auditory-motor mechanisms support such learning generally or in a domain-specific manner. In Experiment 1, we tested the specificity of motor processes contributing to learning patterns from speech sequences. Participants either whispered or clapped their hands while listening to structured speech. In Experiment 2, we focused on auditory specificity, testing whether whispering equally affects learning patterns from speech and non-speech sequences. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined whether learning patterns from speech and non-speech sequences are correlated. Whispering had a stronger effect than clapping on learning patterns from speech sequences in Experiment 1. Moreover, whispering impaired statistical learning more strongly from speech than non-speech sequences in Experiment 2. Interestingly, while participants in the non-speech tasks spontaneously synchronized their motor movements with the auditory stream more than participants in the speech tasks, the effect of the motor movements on learning was stronger in the speech domain. Finally, no correlation between speech and non-speech learning was observed. Overall, our findings support the idea that learning statistical patterns from speech versus non-speech relies on segregated mechanisms, and that the speech motor system contributes to auditory statistical learning in a highly specific manner.

Phase-encoded fMRI tracks down brainstorms of natural language processing with subsecond precision.

Natural language processing unfolds information overtime as spatially separated, multimodal, and interconnected neural processes. Existing noninvasive subtraction-based neuroimaging techniques cannot simultaneously achieve the spatial and temporal resolutions required to visualize ongoing information flows across the whole brain. Here we have developed rapid phase-encoded designs to fully exploit the temporal information latent in functional magnetic resonance imaging data, as well as overcoming scanner noise and head-motion challenges during overt language tasks. We captured real-time information flows as coherent hemodynamic waves traveling over the cortical surface during listening, reading aloud, reciting, and oral cross-language interpreting tasks. We were able to observe the timing, location, direction, and surge of traveling waves in all language tasks, which were visualized as "brainstorms" on brain "weather" maps. The paths of hemodynamic traveling waves provide direct evidence for dual-stream models of the visual and auditory systems as well as logistics models for crossmodal and cross-language processing. Specifically, we have tracked down the step-by-step processing of written or spoken sentences first being received and processed by the visual or auditory streams, carried across language and domain-general cognitive regions, and finally delivered as overt speeches monitored through the auditory cortex, which gives a complete picture of information flows across the brain during natural language functioning. PRACTITIONER POINTS: Phase-encoded fMRI enables simultaneous imaging of high spatial and temporal resolution, capturing continuous spatiotemporal dynamics of the entire brain during real-time overt natural language tasks. Spatiotemporal traveling wave patterns provide direct evidence for constructing comprehensive and explicit models of human information processing. This study unlocks the potential of applying rapid phase-encoded fMRI to indirectly track the underlying neural information flows of sequential sensory, motor, and high-order cognitive processes.