English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Acoustic cue selection and discrimination under degradation: Differential contributions of the inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons23123

Scharinger,  Mathias
Max Planck Research Group Auditory Cognition, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons23118

Henry,  Molly
Max Planck Research Group Auditory Cognition, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons19902

Obleser,  Jonas
Max Planck Research Group Auditory Cognition, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Scharinger, M., Henry, M., & Obleser, J. (2015). Acoustic cue selection and discrimination under degradation: Differential contributions of the inferior parietal and posterior temporal cortices. NeuroImage, 106, 373-381. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.11.050.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0029-AC8C-C
Abstract
Auditory categorization is a vital skill for perceiving the acoustic environment. Categorization depends on the discriminability of the sensory input as well as on the ability of the listener to adaptively make use of the relevant features of the sound. Previous studies on categorization have focused either on speech sounds when studying discriminability or on visual stimuli when assessing optimal cue utilization. Here, by contrast, we examined neural sensitivity to stimulus discriminability and optimal cue utilization when categorizing novel, non-speech auditory stimuli not affected by long-term familiarity. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, listeners categorized sounds from two category distributions, differing along two acoustic dimensions: spectral shape and duration. By introducing spectral degradation after the first half of the experiment, we manipulated both stimulus discriminability and the relative informativeness of acoustic cues. Degradation caused an overall decrease in discriminability based on spectral shape, and therefore enhanced the informativeness of duration. A relative increase in duration-cue utilization was accompanied by increased activity in left parietal cortex. Further, discriminability modulated right planum temporale activity to a higher degree when stimuli were spectrally degraded than when they were not. These findings provide support for separable contributions of parietal and posterior temporal areas to perceptual categorization. The parietal cortex seems to support the selective utilization of informative stimulus cues, while the posterior superior temporal cortex as a primarily auditory brain area supports discriminability particularly under acoustic degradation.