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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 4, 2006, 26(1):273-278; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2967-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Listening in Silence Activates Auditory Areas: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Julien Voisin, ^* Aurélie Bidet-Caulet, ^* Olivier Bertrand, and Pierre Fonlupt

Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Unité 280, Institut Fédératif des Neurosciences de Lyon, and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, F-69000, Lyon, France

Directing attention to some acoustic features of a sound has been shown repeatedly to modulate the stimulus-induced neural responses. On the contrary, little is known about the neurophysiological impact of auditory attention when the auditory scene remains empty. We performed an experiment in which subjects had to detect a sound emerging from silence (the sound was detectable after different durations of silence). Two frontal activations (right dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior frontal) were found, regardless of the side where sound was searched for, consistent with the well established role of these regions in attentional control. The main result was that the superior temporal cortex showed activations contralateral to the side where sound was expected to be present. The area extended from the vicinity of Heschl's gyrus to the surrounding areas (planum temporale/anterior lateral areas). The effect consisted of both an increase in the response to a sound delivered after attention was directed to detect its emergence and a baseline shift during the silent period. Thus, in absence of any acoustic stimulus, the search for an auditory input was found to activate the auditory cortex.

Key words: sustained attention; fMRI; auditory; sparse sampling; listening in silence; human cognition, behavior, and anatomy

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Received July 19, 2005; revised November 7, 2005; accepted November 7, 2005.

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