title: Decoding power-spectral profiles from FMRI brain activities during naturalistic auditory experience.
abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated a close relationship between computational acoustic features and neural brain activities, and have largely advanced our understanding of auditory information processing in the human brain. Along this line, we proposed a multidisciplinary study to examine whether power spectral density (PSD) profiles can be decoded from brain activities during naturalistic auditory experience. The study was performed on a high resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset acquired when participants freely listened to the audio-description of the movie "Forrest Gump". Representative PSD profiles existing in the audio-movie were identified by clustering the audio samples according to their PSD descriptors. Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were trained to differentiate the representative PSD profiles using corresponding fMRI brain activities. Based on PSD profile decoding, we explored how the neural decodability correlated to power intensity and frequency deviants. Our experimental results demonstrated that PSD profiles can be reliably decoded from brain activities. We also suggested a sigmoidal relationship between the neural decodability and power intensity deviants of PSD profiles. Our study in addition substantiates the feasibility and advantage of naturalistic paradigm for studying neural encoding of complex auditory information.
authors: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
authors: Xintao
authors: X
authors: Hu
authors: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
authors: Lei
authors: L
authors: Guo
authors: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China. junweihan2010@gmail.com.
authors: Junwei
authors: J
authors: Han
authors: Cortical Architecture Imaging and Discovery Lab, Department of Computer Science and Bioimaging Research Center, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
authors: Tianming
authors: T
authors: Liu
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009040:Motion Pictures; D060388:Support Vector Machine; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory intensity-encoding; Frequency-encoding; Naturalistic paradigm; Power-spectral profile; fMRI brain decoding