Pomper, U;
Curetti, LZ;
Chait, M;
(2023)
Neural dynamics underlying successful auditory short-term memory performance.
European Journal of Neuroscience
10.1111/ejn.16140.
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Abstract
Listeners often operate in complex acoustic environments, consisting of many concurrent sounds. Accurately encoding and maintaining such auditory objects in short-term memory is crucial for communication and scene analysis. Yet, the neural underpinnings of successful auditory short-term memory (ASTM) performance are currently not well understood. To elucidate this issue, we presented a novel, challenging auditory delayed match-to-sample task while recording MEG. Human participants listened to ‘scenes’ comprising three concurrent tone pip streams. The task was to indicate, after a delay, whether a probe stream was present in the just-heard scene. We present three key findings: First, behavioural performance revealed faster responses in correct versus incorrect trials as well as in ‘probe present’ versus ‘probe absent’ trials, consistent with ASTM search. Second, successful compared with unsuccessful ASTM performance was associated with a significant enhancement of event-related fields and oscillatory activity in the theta, alpha and beta frequency ranges. This extends previous findings of an overall increase of persistent activity during short-term memory performance. Third, using distributed source modelling, we found these effects to be confined mostly to sensory areas during encoding, presumably related to ASTM contents per se. Parietal and frontal sources then became relevant during the maintenance stage, indicating that effective STM operation also relies on ongoing inhibitory processes suppressing task-irrelevant information. In summary, our results deliver a detailed account of the neural patterns that differentiate successful from unsuccessful ASTM performance in the context of a complex, multi-object auditory scene.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Neural dynamics underlying successful auditory short-term memory performance |
| Location: | France |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/ejn.16140 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.16140 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | MEG, auditory scene analysis, performance, salience theta, alpha, beta, oscillations |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > The Ear Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177127 |
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