title: Auditory-cortex short-term plasticity induced by selective attention.
abstract: The ability to concentrate on relevant sounds in the acoustic environment is crucial for everyday function and communication. Converging lines of evidence suggests that transient functional changes in auditory-cortex neurons, "short-term plasticity", might explain this fundamental function. Under conditions of strongly focused attention, enhanced processing of attended sounds can take place at very early latencies (~50 ms from sound onset) in primary auditory cortex and possibly even at earlier latencies in subcortical structures. More robust selective-attention short-term plasticity is manifested as modulation of responses peaking at ~100 ms from sound onset in functionally specialized nonprimary auditory-cortical areas by way of stimulus-specific reshaping of neuronal receptive fields that supports filtering of selectively attended sound features from task-irrelevant ones. Such effects have been shown to take effect in ~seconds following shifting of attentional focus. There are findings suggesting that the reshaping of neuronal receptive fields is even stronger at longer auditory-cortex response latencies (~300 ms from sound onset). These longer-latency short-term plasticity effects seem to build up more gradually, within tens of seconds after shifting the focus of attention. Importantly, some of the auditory-cortical short-term plasticity effects observed during selective attention predict enhancements in behaviorally measured sound discrimination performance.
authors.affiliation: Brain and Mind Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, 00076 AALTO, Finland.
authors.forename: Iiro P
authors.initials: IP
authors.lastname: Jääskeläinen
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School and Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA.
authors.forename: Jyrki
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ahveninen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*