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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 14, 2007, 27(46):12684-12689; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2713-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Hearing Illusory Sounds in Noise: Sensory-Perceptual Transformations in Primary Auditory Cortex

Lars Riecke,¹ A. John van Opstal,² Rainer Goebel,¹ and Elia Formisano¹

¹Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands, and ²Department of Biophysics, Institute for Neuroscience, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Correspondence should be addressed to Lars Riecke, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: L.Riecke{at}psychology.unimaas.nl

A sound that is interrupted by silence is perceived as discontinuous. However, when the silence is replaced by noise, the target sound may be heard as uninterrupted. Understanding the neural basis of this continuity illusion may elucidate the ability to track sounds of interest in noisy auditory scenes, but yet little is known. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans we report that activity in primary auditory cortex reflects perceived continuity of illusory tones in noise. Exploiting a parametric manipulation of the illusory stimuli, we show that stimulus-evoked activity does not correlate with the basic acoustic properties of tones or noises, but rather with the abstract dependencies among them. Importantly, changes of neural responses to acoustically identical stimuli parallel changes of listeners' report of perceived continuity of these same stimuli, thus confirming the perceptual nature of these responses. Our findings show that, beyond the sensory representation of an auditory scene, primary auditory areas play a constructive role in the grouping of scene segments into unified auditory percepts.

Key words: illusion; hearing; perceptual grouping; auditory cortex; fMRI; object recognition

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Received June 14, 2007; revised Sept. 3, 2007; accepted Oct. 1, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Lars Riecke, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: L.Riecke{at}psychology.unimaas.nl

This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. H. McDermott and A. J. Oxenham Spectral completion of partially masked sounds PNAS, April 15, 2008; 105(15): 5939 - 5944. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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