O'Connell Samantha Reina, Jounghani Ali Rahimpour, Papadopoulos Julianne Marie, Bortfeld Heather, Lee Goldsworthy Raymond
Caruso Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Computational Brain Research and Intervention (C-BRAIN) Lab, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Audit Percept Cogn. 2025;8(2):132-156. doi: 10.1080/25742442.2025.2510182. Epub 2025 Jun 3.
Individuals with cochlear implants often struggle with melody and timbre perception in music, leading to diminished music appreciation. While they demonstrate proficiency in recognizing beat and rhythm, it remains unclear whether beat information is processed similarly in their brains compared to those with normal hearing.
In this study, adapted from Rahimpour et al. (2020), both cochlear implant users and normal hearing listeners engaged in finger tapping tasks that synchronized or syncopated with isochronous beats. Participants were asked to align their taps with an auditory metronome (pacing) and then maintain tapping pace after the metronome attenuation (continuation). Hemodynamic responses were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during tapping.
Results revealed comparable performance between cochlear implant users and normal hearing listeners in the finger tapping task, with both groups finding the syncopated continuation task particularly challenging for maintaining consistent tapping. Despite similar tapping performance, cochlear implant users exhibited more widespread hemodynamic activation than normal hearing listeners in temporal, frontal, motor, and parietal regions.
Cochlear implant users engage auditory-motor networks during beat processing akin to normal hearing listeners; however, factors such as neural adaptation post-cochlear implantation and heightened listening effort may contribute to the observed widespread activation.
人工耳蜗植入者在音乐旋律和音色感知方面常常存在困难，导致音乐欣赏能力下降。虽然他们在识别节拍和节奏方面表现出一定能力，但与听力正常者相比，其大脑中节拍信息的处理方式是否相似仍不清楚。
本研究改编自拉欣普尔等人（2020年）的研究，人工耳蜗植入者和听力正常的听众都参与了与等时节拍同步或切分的手指敲击任务。参与者被要求使他们的敲击与听觉节拍器同步（定速），然后在节拍器减弱后保持敲击节奏（持续）。在敲击过程中，使用功能近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）记录血液动力学反应。
结果显示，人工耳蜗植入者和听力正常的听众在手指敲击任务中的表现相当，两组都发现切分持续任务对于保持一致的敲击特别具有挑战性。尽管敲击表现相似，但人工耳蜗植入者在颞叶、额叶、运动和顶叶区域表现出比听力正常的听众更广泛的血液动力学激活。
人工耳蜗植入者在节拍处理过程中与听力正常的听众一样会激活听觉-运动网络；然而，人工耳蜗植入后的神经适应和增加的听力努力等因素可能导致观察到的广泛激活。
