Frontal top-down signals increase coupling of auditory low-frequency oscillations to continuous speech in human listeners.

ABSTRACT: Humans show a remarkable ability to understand continuous speech even under adverse listening conditions. This ability critically relies on dynamically updated predictions of incoming sensory information, but exactly how top-down predictions improve speech processing is still unclear. Brain oscillations are a likely mechanism for these top-down predictions [1, 2]. Quasi-rhythmic components in speech are known to entrain low-frequency oscillations in auditory areas [3, 4], and this entrainment increases with intelligibility [5]. We hypothesize that top-down signals from frontal brain areas causally modulate the phase of brain oscillations in auditory cortex. We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to monitor brain oscillations in 22 participants during continuous speech perception. We character

SUBMITTER: Park H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4503802 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature