Effects of Focal Brain Injury on Local-Global Audition

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The current research proposal aims to implement new stimuli in an investigation of the underlying neural substrates involved in auditory local and global perceptual organization. To accomplish this goal, we plan to test patients with unilateral lesions to the posterior superior temporal gyrus and the surrounding temporal-parietal association cortex, with special attention to whether lateralization of function occurs as in visual hierarchical processing (namely, biases for right and left hemisphere involvement in global and local processing, respectively). These investigations will be complemented with a follow up experiment investigating whether, in neurologically-intact individuals, rTMS over right or left pSTG/TPJ can produce selective deficits in global or local auditory processing, respectively. Combining neuropsychology and TMS provides the opportunity to distinguish between deficits due to neural reorganization after stroke or simply to focal disruption. Together, the proposed studies will provide the candidate with a wealth of novel training opportunities. The current research will also result in a valuable collection of data from convergent approaches to examining brain-behavior relationships necessary for auditory perceptual organization.