Oscillatory Dynamics in Auditory Attention
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1
Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale(INSERM), France
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2
University Lyon 1, France
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3
INSERM U821, Department Functional Neurology and Epileptology, France
Neuroimaging studies have shown that sensory processing can be strongly affected by attention, acting either on preparatory endogenous processes or directly on the processing of the actual incoming stimulus. We investigated these attention effects in the auditory modality in humans, with a particular focus on the cortical evoked and induced oscillatory activities recorded at different levels: intracranial EEG with depth electrodes in epileptic patients and MEG at the scalp level in healthy subjects. Two specific questions were addressed:
(1) How are auditory cortex activations affected during the active selection of an auditory stream in a situation of concurrent stream perception? To dissociate the neural activity specifically corresponding to either stream, we tagged long-duration sounds with distinct amplitude modulation frequencies. By observing spatio-temporal characteristics of the evoked oscillatory steady-state responses in intracranial EEG recordings, we found attention effects in the primary auditory cortex during sound rivalry: attention can operate both by enhancing the neural representation of the relevant sound and by reducing the representation of irrelevant information.
(2) What are the oscillatory activities when spatial attention is cued toward a specific auditory target stimulus? In a MEG experiment, we found, during the cue-target interval, alpha desynchronization localized in the auditory cortices, showing some lateralization effects according to the cued side. Furthermore stronger selective attention appeared to modulate post-stimulus alpha desynchronization, particularly in the right hemisphere in dependence of the previous cue information. This result is consistent with the hypothesized inhibitory role of alpha oscillations, as already demonstrated in the visual or motor system. The simultaneously recorded steady-state responses add support to our intracranial results mentioned above. Both experiments engaged selective auditory attention, acting either on the processing of the auditory input itself, or on the preparatory period, even in the absence of sound. We report here how different oscillatory activities in the auditory cortex could be involved at different stages of attentional processing.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Symposium 1: Neuronal synchrony in attentional selection
Citation:
Bertrand
O,
Bidet-Caulet
A,
Weisz
N and
Fischer
C
(2008). Oscillatory Dynamics in Auditory Attention.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.010
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Received:
26 Nov 2008;
Published Online:
26 Nov 2008.
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Correspondence:
Olivier Bertrand, Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale(INSERM), Lyon, France, olivier.bertrand@inserm.fr