Norman-Haignere Sam V, Keshishian Menoua, Devinsky Orrin, Doyle Werner, McKhann Guy M, Schevon Catherine A, Flinker Adeen, Mesgarani Nima
Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2025 Sep 18. doi: 10.1038/s41593-025-02060-8.
Sound structures such as phonemes and words have highly variable durations. Therefore, there is a fundamental difference between integrating across absolute time (for example, 100 ms) versus sound structure (for example, phonemes). Auditory and cognitive models have traditionally cast neural integration in terms of time and structure, respectively, but the extent to which cortical computations reflect time or structure remains unknown. Here, to answer this question, we rescaled the duration of all speech structures using time stretching and compression and measured integration windows in the human auditory cortex using a new experimental and computational method applied to spatiotemporally precise intracranial recordings. We observed slightly longer integration windows for stretched speech, but this lengthening was very small (~5%) relative to the change in structure durations, even in non-primary regions strongly implicated in speech-specific processing. These findings demonstrate that time-yoked computations dominate throughout the human auditory cortex, placing important constraints on neurocomputational models of structure processing.
诸如音素和单词之类的语音结构具有高度可变的时长。因此，在跨绝对时间（例如100毫秒）与跨语音结构（例如音素）进行整合之间存在根本差异。传统上，听觉模型和认知模型分别从时间和结构的角度来构建神经整合，但皮质计算在多大程度上反映时间或结构仍不清楚。在这里，为了回答这个问题，我们使用时间拉伸和压缩来重新调整所有语音结构的时长，并使用一种应用于时空精确颅内记录的新实验和计算方法，测量人类听觉皮层中的整合窗口。我们观察到，对于拉伸后的语音，整合窗口略长，但相对于结构时长的变化，这种延长非常小（约5%），即使在与语音特异性处理密切相关的非初级区域也是如此。这些发现表明，时间关联计算在整个人类听觉皮层中占主导地位，这对结构处理的神经计算模型施加了重要限制。
