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The Journal of Neuroscience, May 9, 2007, 27(19):5207-5214; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0318-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Processing Asymmetry of Transitions between Order and Disorder in Human Auditory Cortex

Maria Chait,¹ David Poeppel,^1,2,3 Alain de Cheveigné,⁵ and Jonathan Z. Simon^1,3,4

¹Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, ²Department of Linguistics, ³Department of Biology, ⁴Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, ⁵Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Perception (Formation de Recherche en Évolution 2929), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris Descartes, and Département d'Etudes Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, Paris 75230, France

Correspondence should be addressed to Maria Chait, Equipe Audition, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, Paris 75230, France. Email: mariac{at}wam.umd.edu

Auditory environments vary as a result of the appearance and disappearance of acoustic sources, as well as fluctuations characteristic of the sources themselves. The appearance of an object is often manifest as a transition in the pattern of ongoing fluctuation, rather than an onset or offset of acoustic power. How does the system detect and process such transitions? Based on magnetoencephalography data, we show that the temporal dynamics and response morphology of the neural temporal-edge detection processes depend in precise ways on the nature of the change. We measure auditory cortical responses to transitions between "disorder," modeled as a sequence of random frequency tone pips, and "order," modeled as a constant tone. Such transitions embody key characteristics of natural auditory edges. Early cortical responses (from 50 ms post-transition) reveal that order–disorder transitions, and vice versa, are processed by different neural mechanisms. Their dynamics suggest that the auditory cortex optimally adjusts to stimulus statistics, even when this is not required for overt behavior. Furthermore, this response profile bears a striking similarity to that measured from another order–disorder transition, between interaurally correlated and uncorrelated noise, a radically different stimulus. This parallelism suggests the existence of a general mechanism that operates early in the processing stream on the abstract statistics of the auditory input, and is putatively related to the processes of constructing a new representation or detecting a deviation from a previously acquired model of the auditory scene. Together, the data reveal information about the mechanisms with which the brain samples, represents, and detects changes in the environment.

Key words: auditory evoked response; magnetoencephalography; auditory cortex; integration window; change detection; scene analysis; M100; M50; MMN

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Received Jan. 24, 2007; revised March 17, 2007; accepted April 11, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Maria Chait, Equipe Audition, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, Paris 75230, France. Email: mariac{at}wam.umd.edu

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