Abstract
Current models successfully describe the auditory cortical response to natural sounds with a set of spectro-temporal features. However, these models have hardly been linked to the ill-understood neurobiological changes that occur in the aging auditory cortex. Modelling the hemodynamic response to a rich natural sound mixture in N = 64 listeners of varying age, we here show that in older listeners’ auditory cortex, the key feature of temporal rate is represented with a markedly broader tuning. This loss of temporal selectivity is most prominent in primary auditory cortex and planum temporale, with no such changes in adjacent auditory or other brain areas. Amongst older listeners, we observe a direct relationship between chronological age and temporal-rate tuning, unconfounded by auditory acuity or model goodness of fit. In line with senescent neural dedifferentiation more generally, our results highlight decreased selectivity to temporal information as a hallmark of the aging auditory cortex.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e55300 |
| Journal | eLife |
| Volume | 9 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-21 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 07.2020 |
Funding
This research was funded by an ERC consolidator Grant (ERC-CoG-2014–646696 ‘AUDADAPT’ to JO) and the German Research Foundation (DFG; OB 352/2–1). Martin Göttlich helped with MR sequences. Anne Herrmann, Malte Naujokat, Clara Mergner, and Anne Ruhe helped acquire the data. We are grateful for the methods and analysis tools developed at the Department for Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, in particular by Federico De Martino, Roberta Santoro and Elia Formisano which were central for the current project. We thank the members of the Auditory Cognition group as well as the editors and reviewers for very constructive feedback on the present study.
Research Areas and Centers
- Academic Focus: Center for Brain, Behavior and Metabolism (CBBM)
