Article abstract
Nature Neuroscience 11, 603 - 608 (2008)
Published online: 20 April 2008 | doi:10.1038/nn.2109
Cortical activity patterns predict speech discrimination ability
Crystal T Engineer1, Claudia A Perez1, YeTing H Chen1, Ryan S Carraway1, Amanda C Reed1, Jai A Shetake1, Vikram Jakkamsetti1, Kevin Q Chang1 & Michael P Kilgard1
Abstract
Neural activity in the cerebral cortex can explain many aspects of sensory perception. Extensive psychophysical and neurophysiological studies of visual motion and vibrotactile processing show that the firing rate of cortical neurons averaged across 50–500 ms is well correlated with discrimination ability. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that primary auditory cortex (A1) neurons use temporal precision on the order of 1–10 ms to represent speech sounds shifted into the rat hearing range. Neural discrimination was highly correlated with behavioral performance on 11 consonant-discrimination tasks when spike timing was preserved and was not correlated when spike timing was eliminated. This result suggests that spike timing contributes to the auditory cortex representation of consonant sounds.
- School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA.
Correspondence to: Michael P Kilgard1 e-mail: kilgard@utdallas.edu
Correspondence to: Crystal T Engineer1 e-mail: novitski@utdallas.edu
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