Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Nat Commun. 2016 Dec 20;7:13654. doi: 10.1038/ncomms13654.
Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis. This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood. Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models. We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex. Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range. This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed 'perceptual enhancement' in understanding speech.
经验在每时每刻塑造着我们对世界的感知。这种经验的强大感知效应与刺激特征的神经表示的变化相似，尽管这种表示的性质及其可塑性还没有得到很好的理解。频谱时间 receptive field (STRF) 映射描述了对声音特征的神经反应，并且已经被用于研究动物模型中听觉感受野的上下文效应。我们对直接从人类听觉皮层获得的电生理记录数据进行了 STRF 可塑性分析。在这里，我们报告了记录的神经集合的频谱时间反应的快速、自动可塑性，这种可塑性是由先前的声音和语言信息的经验驱动的，具有亚秒级的神经生理效应。这种可塑性反映了对频谱时间特征的敏感性增加，从而增强了从退化刺激中提取更像语音的特征的能力，并为观察到的理解语音的“感知增强”提供了生理基础。
