Elsevier

Cognitive Brain Research

Volume 8, Issue 2, 16 July 1999, Pages 117-124
Cognitive Brain Research

Research report
The time course of the BOLD response in the human auditory cortex to acoustic stimuli of different duration

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(99)00012-9Get rights and content

Abstract

The relationship between activity within the human auditory cortices and the duration of heard tones was investigated by measuring the hemodynamic response with functional magnetic resonance imaging. We demonstrate that there is no significant influence of stimulus duration as used here on the intensity and spatial extent of the hemodynamic response in the auditory cortices. We found however, that the time course of the hemodynamic response to the repeated stimulus presentation exhibited a characteristic decline after the first stimulus exposure during the activation period. The possible reasons for this time course are currently unknown, however, several factors may be involved, including top-down mechanisms and/or the interplay of tissue perfusion and oxygen consumption.

Introduction

The susceptibility of blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) effect can be exploited to provide activation maps of the human auditory cortex by MRI in response to acoustic stimuli 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 29, 33. Much of this work has proceeded with little information about the effects on response magnitude of such stimulus variables such as rate, intensity, and duration. Only a few studies investigated the influence of these basic stimulus variables on the BOLD response. For instance intensity, rate as well as the TR time have been shown to be significant variables determining the BOLD response in the primary and secondary auditory cortex 3, 4, 11, 24. However, stimulus duration and its potential influence on the BOLD response has not been investigated in detail. The present study therefore was designed to investigate the relationship between stimulus duration and the BOLD response in the primary and secondary auditory cortex. Because a recent fMRI study suggested considerable spatio-temporal variability of the hemodynamic response to the same repetitive auditory stimulus [20], we also analysed the time course of the BOLD response within the primary and secondary auditory cortex in relation to stimulus duration.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Five male right-handed volunteers, ranging in age from 20 to 40 years, with no history of neurological or audiological illness were studied. After a full explanation of the nature and risks of the research, subjects gave informed written consent for all studies according to a protocol approved by the Ethics Committee of the Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf.

Functional MR images were acquired using a 1.5 T Siemens MRI system (SIEMENS Magnetom Vision, Erlangen), equipped with echo planar

Results

Comparison of each auditory activation condition compared to rest produced highly significant bilateral increases in the BOLD signal involving the primary and secondary auditory cortex on the superior temporal gyrus (Fig. 1 and Table 1). The planned comparisons between the activations obtained in the four auditory stimulation conditions revealed no significant difference. There was also no significant Time×Task interaction. Thus, there was no effect of stimulus duration on the location,

Discussion

The present results demonstrate that tone duration does not have an inevitable substantial influence on the hemodynamic response in the auditory cortex at least for tone durations and the presentation rate applied here. This is quite astonishing considering the strong difference in the integrated stimulus duration for each scanning sequence. In effect, during the 800 ms condition, the integrated stimulus duration is 3200 s while for the 200 ms condition, the integrated stimulus duration is 800

Acknowledgements

This study was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG JA 737/5-1). The guest scientists (TWB, KL, LJ) would like to thank the Research Centre Jülich for providing the facilities that made this work possible. Tony Buchanan was supported by a grant from the Research Centre Jülich as well as an individual National Research Service Award (# 1 F31 MH 11844-01) from the National Institute of Mental Health, USA.

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