title: Population receptive field estimates of human auditory cortex.
abstract: Here we describe a method for measuring tonotopic maps and estimating bandwidth for voxels in human primary auditory cortex (PAC) using a modification of the population Receptive Field (pRF) model, developed for retinotopic mapping in visual cortex by Dumoulin and Wandell (2008). The pRF method reliably estimates tonotopic maps in the presence of acoustic scanner noise, and has two advantages over phase-encoding techniques. First, the stimulus design is flexible and need not be a frequency progression, thereby reducing biases due to habituation, expectation, and estimation artifacts, as well as reducing the effects of spatio-temporal BOLD nonlinearities. Second, the pRF method can provide estimates of bandwidth as a function of frequency. We find that bandwidth estimates are narrower for voxels within the PAC than in surrounding auditory responsive regions (non-PAC).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1525, USA. Electronic address: jmthomas@uw.edu.
authors.forename: Jessica M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1525, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Huber
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98105, USA; Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville TN 37232, USA.
authors.forename: G Christopher
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Stecker
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1525, USA.
authors.forename: Geoffrey M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Boynton
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Recherche en Neuroimagerie (LREN), Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Lausanne University Hospital, 1011, Switzerland; Institute of Bioengineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Saenz
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1525, USA.
authors.forename: Ione
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Fine
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory cortex; Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); Population receptive field (pRF); Tonotopy