Auditory-cognitive mapping in the frontal cortex during perceptual interference

感知干扰期间额叶皮层的听觉认知映射

• 批准号: 8649875
• 负责人: Nikolas Francis
• 金额: $ 5.34万
• 依托单位: UNIV OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-12-01 至 2014-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8649875
• 关键词: Acoustics; Affect; Animals; Association Learning; Attention; Auditory; Behavior; Behavioral; Brain; Code; Cognitive; Crowding; Cues; Discrimination; Environment; Ferrets; Frequencies; Future; Goals; Hearing; Judgment; Knowledge; Lead; Learning; Light; Maintenance; Maps; Measurement; Memory; Neurons; Noise; Perception; Performance; Physiology; Play; Population; Process; Punishment; Rewards; Risk; Risk Assessment; Role; Sensory; Signal Transduction; Stimulus; Task Performances; Uncertainty; Voice; Water; Work; auditory discrimination; experience; frontal lobe; public health relevance; relating to nervous system; research study; response; sensory cortex; sensory system; sound; therapy design

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Interacting with natural acoustic environments requires learning how to respond to behaviorally meaningful sounds. The frontal cortex (FC) plays a central role in enabling us to learn associations between sounds and actions. Neurons within the FC are involved with attention, memory, knowledge of task rules, risk, and reward. A key feature of FC neurons is that they are highly adaptive in response to changes in ongoing cognitive demands. In this project, our long-term objective is to understand how the FC changes its neural codes for associations between sounds and their behavioral meanings when listening becomes difficult. Participating in a conversation in a crowded room is a common example of difficult listening, especially when neighboring voices are similar. It remains unclear how such listening tasks affect FC responses to sound for single neurons and small populations of neurons. To explore this topic, we developed an auditory task in which animals learn to receive a reward or avoid punishment by, respectively, continuing or stopping to lick a water spout in response to acoustic cues. We shall record neural responses in the FC while the animals perform these tasks. We hypothesize that increasing the similarity of task sounds will make the task more difficult, and that FC responses to the sounds will be modulated with similarity. Our preliminary results suggest that, even when the objective task-difficulty remains unchanged, the strength of FC responses is highly correlated with how well an animal performs the task. Thus, our results shed light on how the brain's response to sound changes according to the subjective experience of listening difficulty. In another twist on these questions, we shall consider how background noise makes listening difficult. Drawing from the previous example, having an intimate conversation in a crowded room will be difficult if the overall level of voices in the roo is high. To the best of our knowledge, the effect of background noise on FC responses to sounds during an auditory task has not been studied. To explore this topic, we will again have animals listen for behaviorally meaningful acoustic cues, but with the addition of acoustic background noise to increase task difficulty. We hypothesize that FC activity will be modulated by the level of noise, reflecting the animals' uncertainty in detecting the acoustic cues. Listenig can be challenging for healthy and hearing impaired people. Our studies will help clarify the basic understanding of FC physiology during difficult listening behaviors. As a result, our work will contribute to future therapies designed to enable better hearing in every-day settings.

描述(由申请人提供)：与自然声学环境互动需要学习如何对行为上有意义的声音做出反应。额叶皮质(FC)在使我们能够了解声音和动作之间的联系方面发挥着核心作用。FC内的神经元涉及注意力、记忆、任务规则、风险和奖励的知识。Fc神经元的一个关键特征是它们对正在进行的认知需求的变化具有高度的适应性。在这个项目中，我们的长期目标是了解当倾听变得困难时，FC如何改变其神经代码，以建立声音与其行为意义之间的联系。在拥挤的房间里参与对话是一个常见的难以倾听的例子，特别是当相邻的声音相似的时候。目前尚不清楚这样的听力任务如何影响单个神经元和小群神经元对声音的FC反应。为了探索这一主题，我们开发了一项听觉任务，在这项任务中，动物学习通过继续或停止舔水嘴来接受奖励或避免惩罚，以响应声音提示。当动物执行这些任务时，我们将在FC中记录神经反应。我们假设，增加任务声音的相似性会使任务变得更加困难，而对声音的FC反应将根据相似性进行调制。我们的初步结果表明，即使在客观任务难度保持不变的情况下，FC反应的强度也与动物执行任务的好坏高度相关。因此，我们的结果阐明了大脑对声音的反应是如何随着听力困难的主观体验而变化的。在这些问题的另一个转折中，我们将考虑背景噪音是如何使听力变得困难的。从前面的例子可以看出，如果roo中的声音整体水平很高，那么在拥挤的房间里进行亲密对话将是困难的。就我们所知，在听觉任务中背景噪声对声音的FC反应的影响还没有被研究过。为了探索这个话题，我们将再次让动物倾听行为上有意义的声学提示，但增加了声学背景噪音以增加任务难度。我们假设FC的活动将受到噪声水平的调节，这反映了动物在检测声学线索方面的不确定性。Listenig对健康和听力受损的人来说可能是一个挑战。我们的研究将有助于澄清困难听力行为中的功能障碍生理学的基本认识。因此，我们的工作将有助于未来的治疗，旨在使更好的听力在日常环境中。