Cortical Centres Underlying Auditory Temporal Processing in Humans: A PET Study

Abstract

We have used positron emission tomography (PET) to test a specific hypothesis of a neural system subserving auditory temporal processing (acoustical stimulus duration discrimination). Maps of the cerebral blood flow distribution during specific stimulations weobtained from five normally-hearing and otherwise healthy subjects. The auditory stimuli consisted of sounds of varying duration and of auditorily presented words in which the duration of the initial phoneme was manipulated. All stimuli alternated with conditions of silence in a subtraction paradigm. The blood flow distribution was mapped with O-15-labelled water. The results demonstrated that stimuli requiring recognizing, memorizing, or attending to specific target sounds during temporal processing generally resulted in significant activation of both frontal lobes and the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere. Based on these results, we hypothesise that a network consisting of anterior and posterior auditory attention and short-term memory sites subserves acoustical stimulus duration perception and analysis (auditory temporal processing).

Key Words:

• Auditory temporal processing
• Functional brain imaging
• Prefrontal cortex
• Parietal cortex
• Attention
• Memory