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In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. This volume argues that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.

The meanings and causes of hearing voices that others cannot hear (auditory verbal hallucinations, in psychiatric parlance) have been debated for thousands of years. Voice-hearing has been both revered and condemned, understood as a symptom of disease as well as a source of otherworldly communication. Those hearing voices have been viewed as mystics, potential psychiatric patients or simply just people with unusual experiences, and have been beatified, esteemed or accepted, as well as drugged, burnt or gassed. This book travels from voice-hearing in the ancient world through to contemporary experience, examining how power, politics, gender, medicine and religion have shaped the meaning of hearing voices. Who hears voices today, what these voices are like and their potential impact are comprehensively examined. Cutting edge neuroscience is integrated with current psychological theories to consider what may cause voices and the future of research in voice-hearing is explored.

Key Points An auditory object is a perceptual construct, corresponding to the sound that can be assigned to a particular acoustic source. An auditory object spans acoustic events that unfold over time, and a sequence of objects forms a 'stream': for example, when a person is walking, the sound of each step is a unique auditory object but the temporal sequence of footsteps is linked together to form a stream. An auditory object is constructed from the spectrotemporal regularities in the acoustic environment. More specifically, an auditory stimulus comes into our awareness as a sound as a result of the simultaneous and sequential principles that group the acoustic features of the auditory stimulus into stable spectrotemporal entities. Auditory-object processing occurs in the cortex. In particular, the ventral auditory pathway mediates the computations underlying a listener's ability to perceive a sound (auditory object), whereas object-related information that is found in the dorsal pathway is used in the pursuit of audiomotor behaviours. Neural correlates of the perception of an auditory object are found in the auditory cortex. Whereas some studies indicate that the ventral pathway contains brain regions specialized for auditory-object processing, auditory perception is most likely to be mediated by a broad network of brain areas in this pathway. A hallmark of auditory-object processing is that it can be influenced by attention and that attention can act on the object itself and not the lower-level spectrotemporal details of the auditory stimulus. Both single-unit and functional imaging studies demonstrate the effects of attention on the representation of auditory objects in the auditory cortex. In order to make sense of the multitude of acoustic stimuli that surround us in our daily lives, the auditory system needs to be able to assign different sounds to specific sources within the 'auditory scene'. Bizley and Cohen describe how auditory information processing in the cortex categorizes and groups different sounds into 'auditory objects'. The fundamental perceptual unit in hearing is the 'auditory object'. Similar to visual objects, auditory objects are the computational result of the auditory system's capacity to detect, extract, segregate and group spectrotemporal regularities in the acoustic environment; the multitude of acoustic stimuli around us together form the auditory scene. However, unlike the visual scene, resolving the component objects within the auditory scene crucially depends on their temporal structure. Neural correlates of auditory objects are found throughout the auditory system. However, neural responses do not become correlated with a listener's perceptual reports until the level of the cortex. The roles of different neural structures and the contribution of different cognitive states to the perception of auditory objects are not yet fully understood.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a key biomarker of automatic deviance detection thought to emerge from 2 cortical sources. First, the auditory cortex (AC) encodes spectral regularities and reports frequency-specific deviances. Then, more abstract representations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) allow to detect contextual changes of potential behavioral relevance. However, the precise location and time asynchronies between neuronal correlates underlying this frontotemporal network remain unclear and elusive. Our study presented auditory oddball paradigms along with “no-repetition” controls to record mismatch responses in neuronal spiking activity and local field potentials at the rat medial PFC. Whereas mismatch responses in the auditory system are mainly induced by stimulus-dependent effects, we found that auditory responsiveness in the PFC was driven by unpredictability, yielding context-dependent, comparatively delayed, more robust and longer-lasting mismatch responses mostly comprised of prediction error signaling activity. This characteristically different composition discarded that mismatch responses in the PFC could be simply inherited or amplified downstream from the auditory system. Conversely, it is more plausible for the PFC to exert top-down influences on the AC, since the PFC exhibited flexible and potent predictive processing, capable of suppressing redundant input more efficiently than the AC. Remarkably, the time course of the mismatch responses we observed in the spiking activity and local field potentials of the AC and the PFC combined coincided with the time course of the large-scale MMN-like signals reported in the rat brain, thereby linking the microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic levels of automatic deviance detection.

This study uses EEG in humans to isolate and track an evolving, domain-general decision signal, which varies with accumulated evidence, but is independent of overt actions. In theoretical accounts of perceptual decision-making, a decision variable integrates noisy sensory evidence and determines action through a boundary-crossing criterion. Signals bearing these very properties have been characterized in single neurons in monkeys, but have yet to be directly identified in humans. Using a gradual target detection task, we isolated a freely evolving decision variable signal in human subjects that exhibited every aspect of the dynamics observed in its single-neuron counterparts. This signal could be continuously tracked in parallel with fully dissociable sensory encoding and motor preparation signals, and could be systematically perturbed mid-flight during decision formation. Furthermore, we found that the signal was completely domain general: it exhibited the same decision-predictive dynamics regardless of sensory modality and stimulus features and tracked cumulative evidence even in the absence of overt action. These findings provide a uniquely clear view on the neural determinants of simple perceptual decisions in humans.

Oxytocin is important for social interactions and maternal behaviour. However, little is known about when, where and how oxytocin modulates neural circuits to improve social cognition. Here we show how oxytocin enables pup retrieval behaviour in female mice by enhancing auditory cortical pup call responses. Retrieval behaviour required the left but not right auditory cortex, was accelerated by oxytocin in the left auditory cortex, and oxytocin receptors were preferentially expressed in the left auditory cortex. Neural responses to pup calls were lateralized, with co-tuned and temporally precise excitatory and inhibitory responses in the left cortex of maternal but not pup-naive adults. Finally, pairing calls with oxytocin enhanced responses by balancing the magnitude and timing of inhibition with excitation. Our results describe fundamental synaptic mechanisms by which oxytocin increases the salience of acoustic social stimuli. Furthermore, oxytocin-induced plasticity provides a biological basis for lateralization of auditory cortical processing. A study of pup retrieval behaviour in mice shows that oxytocin modulates cortical responses to pup calls specifically in the left auditory cortex; in virgin females, call-evoked responses were enhanced, thus increasing their salience, by pairing oxytocin delivery in the left auditory cortex with the calls, suggesting enhancement was a result of balancing the magnitude and timing of inhibition with excitation. Maternal actions of oxytocin The role of oxytocin in modulating social interactions and maternal behaviour is well documented, but how this hormone influences neural circuits to drive these behavioral changes is not well understood. Here, Robert Froemke and colleagues study pup retrieval behaviour in mice and find that oxytocin modulates cortical responses to pup calls specifically in the left auditory cortex. In virgin females, call-evoked responses were enhanced, thus increasing their salience, by pairing oxytocin delivery in left auditory cortex with the calls. This enhancement came about through a specific balancing of the magnitude and timing of inhibition with excitation.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is diverse, manifesting in a wide array of phenotypes. However, a consistent theme is reduced communicative and social abilities. Auditory processing deficits have been shown in individuals with ASD—these deficits may play a role in the communication difficulties ASD individuals experience. Specifically, children with ASD have delayed neural timing and poorer tracking of a changing pitch relative to their typically developing peers. Given that accurate processing of sound requires highly coordinated and consistent neural activity, we hypothesized that these auditory processing deficits stem from a failure to respond to sound in a consistent manner. Therefore, we predicted that individuals with ASD have reduced neural stability in response to sound. We recorded the frequency-following response (FFR), an evoked response that mirrors the acoustic features of its stimulus, of high-functioning children with ASD age 7–13 years. Evident across multiple speech stimuli, children with ASD have less stable FFRs to speech sounds relative to their typically developing peers. This reduced auditory stability could contribute to the language and communication profiles observed in individuals with ASD.

Humans and other animals use spatial hearing to rapidly localize events in the environment. However, neural encoding of sound location is a complex process involving the computation and integration of multiple spatial cues that are not represented directly in the sensory organ (the cochlea). Our understanding of these mechanisms has increased enormously in the past few years. Current research is focused on the contribution of animal models for understanding human spatial audition, the effects of behavioural demands on neural sound location encoding, the emergence of a cue-independent location representation in the auditory cortex, and the relationship between single-source and concurrent location encoding in complex auditory scenes. Furthermore, computational modelling seeks to unravel how neural representations of sound source locations are derived from the complex binaural waveforms of real-life sounds. In this article, we review and integrate the latest insights from neurophysiological, neuroimaging and computational modelling studies of mammalian spatial hearing. We propose that the cortical representation of sound location emerges from recurrent processing taking place in a dynamic, adaptive network of early (primary) and higher-order (posterior–dorsal and dorsolateral prefrontal) auditory regions. This cortical network accommodates changing behavioural requirements and is especially relevant for processing the location of real-life, complex sounds and complex auditory scenes.