Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Bucknell University, Department of Psychology, Lewisburg 17837, PA, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2018 Mar 1;28(3):805-818. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhw397.
When hearing knocking on a door, a listener typically identifies both the action (forceful and repeated impacts) and the object (a thick wooden board) causing the sound. The current work studied the neural bases of sound source identification by switching listeners' attention toward these different aspects of a set of simple sounds during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning: participants either discriminated the action or the material that caused the sounds, or they simply discriminated meaningless scrambled versions of them. Overall, discriminating action and material elicited neural activity in a left-lateralized frontoparietal network found in other studies of sound identification, wherein the inferior frontal sulcus and the ventral premotor cortex were under the control of selective attention and sensitive to task demand. More strikingly, discriminating materials elicited increased activity in cortical regions connecting auditory inputs to semantic, motor, and even visual representations, whereas discriminating actions did not increase activity in any regions. These results indicate that discriminating and identifying material requires deeper processing of the stimuli than discriminating actions. These results are consistent with previous studies suggesting that auditory perception is better suited to comprehend the actions than the objects producing sounds in the listeners' environment.
当听到敲门声时，听众通常可以识别出发出声音的动作（有力且反复的撞击）和物体（一块厚厚的木板）。当前的工作通过在功能磁共振成像扫描期间将听众的注意力切换到一组简单声音的这些不同方面，研究了声源识别的神经基础：参与者要么辨别声音产生的动作或材料，要么简单地辨别它们无意义的乱序版本。总的来说，辨别动作和材料会引起左外侧额顶叶网络的神经活动，这在其他声音识别研究中也有发现，其中下额前回和腹侧运动前皮层受到选择性注意的控制，并且对任务需求敏感。更引人注目的是，辨别材料会引起听觉输入与语义、运动甚至视觉表示相关的皮质区域的活动增加，而辨别动作不会增加任何区域的活动。这些结果表明，辨别和识别材料比辨别动作需要更深入的处理刺激。这些结果与之前的研究一致，表明听觉感知更适合理解听众环境中产生声音的动作，而不是物体。
