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Although it has been established that cross‐modal activations occur in the occipital cortex during auditory processing among congenitally and early blind listeners, it remains uncertain whether these activations in various occipital regions reflect sensory analysis of specific sound properties, non‐perceptual cognitive operations associated with active tasks, or the interplay between sensory analysis and cognitive operations. This fMRI study aimed to investigate cross‐modal responses in occipital regions, specifically V5/MT and V1, during passive and active pitch perception by early blind individuals compared to sighted individuals. The data showed that V5/MT was responsive to pitch during passive perception, and its activations increased with task complexity. By contrast, widespread occipital regions, including V1, were only recruited during two active perception tasks, and their activations were also modulated by task complexity. These fMRI results from blind individuals suggest that while V5/MT activations are both stimulus‐responsive and task‐modulated, activations in other occipital regions, including V1, are dependent on the task, indicating similarities and differences between various visual areas during auditory processing. In blind listeners relative to sighted controls, V5/MT is responsive to passive pitch perception, but V1 is recruited only during active pitch perception.

The vocal imitation of pitch by singing requires one to plan laryngeal movements on the basis of anticipated target pitch events. This process may rely on auditory imagery, which has been shown to activate motor planning areas. As such, we hypothesized that poor-pitch singing, although not typically associated with deficient pitch perception, may be associated with deficient auditory imagery. Participants vocally imitated simple pitch sequences by singing, discriminated pitch pairs on the basis of pitch height, and completed an auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale). The percentage of trials participants sung in tune correlated significantly with self-reports of vividness for auditory imagery, although not with the ability to control auditory imagery. Pitch discrimination was not predicted by auditory imagery scores. The results thus support a link between auditory imagery and vocal imitation.

Learning a spoken language presupposes efficient auditory functions. In the present event-related potential study, we tested whether and how basic auditory processes are related to online learning of a linguistic rule in infants and adults. Participants listened to frequent standard stimuli, which were interspersed with infrequent pitch deviants and rule deviants, violating a nonadjacent dependency between two syllables. Only infants who showed the more mature mismatch response for the pitch deviants (i.e., a negativity) showed a mismatch response to the rule deviants. Concordantly, the small group of adults who showed evidence of rule learning showed larger mismatch effects for pitch processing. We conclude that the ability to extract linguistic rules develops in early infancy and is tightly linked to functional aspects of basic auditory mechanisms.

Purpose This study aimed to investigate the effects of low frequency (LF) pitch perception on speech-in-noise and music perception performance by children with cochlear implants (CIC) and typical hearing (THC). Moreover, the relationships between speech-in-noise and music perception as well as the effects of demographic and audiological factors on present research outcomes were studied. Methods The sample consisted of 22 CIC and 20 THC (7–10 years). Harmonic intonation (HI) and disharmonic intonation (DI) tests were used to assess LF pitch perception. Speech perception in quiet (WRSq)/noise (WRSn + 10) were tested with the Italian bisyllabic words for pediatric populations. The Gordon test was used to evaluate music perception (rhythm, melody, harmony, and overall). Results CIC/THC performance comparisons for LF pitch, speech-in-noise, and all music measures except harmony revealed statistically significant differences with large effect sizes. For the CI group, HI showed statistically significant correlations with melody discrimination. Melody/total Gordon scores were significantly correlated with WRSn + 10. For the overall group, HI/DI showed significant correlations with all music perception measures and WRSn + 10. Hearing thresholds showed significant effects on HI/DI scores. Hearing thresholds and WRSn + 10 scores were significantly correlated; both revealed significant effects on all music perception scores. CI age had significant effects on WRSn + 10, harmony, and total Gordon scores (p < 0.05). Conclusion Such findings confirmed the significant effects of LF pitch perception on complex listening performance. Significant speech-in-noise and music perception correlations were as promising as results from recent studies indicating significant positive effects of music training on speech-in-noise recognition in CIC.

Humans' ability to recognize musical melodies is generally limited to pure-tone frequencies below 4 or 5 kHz. This limit coincides with the highest notes on modern musical instruments and is widely believed to reflect the upper limit of precise stimulus-driven spike timing in the auditory nerve. We tested the upper limits of pitch and melody perception in humans using pure and harmonic complex tones, such as those produced by the human voice and musical instruments, in melody recognition and pitch-matching tasks. We found that robust pitch perception can be elicited by harmonic complex tones with fundamental frequencies below 2 kHz, even when all of the individual harmonics are above 6 kHz--well above the currently accepted existence region of pitch and above the currently accepted limits of neural phase locking. The results suggest that the perception of musical pitch at high frequencies is not constrained by temporal phase locking in the auditory nerve but may instead stem from higher-level constraints shaped by prior exposure to harmonic sounds.

Electrophysiological studies show that nicotine enhances neural responses to characteristic frequency stimuli. Previous behavioral studies partially corroborate these findings in young adults, showing that nicotine selectively enhances auditory processing in difficult listening conditions. The present work extended previous work to include both young and older adults and assessed the nicotine effect on sound frequency and intensity discrimination. Hypotheses were that nicotine improves auditory performance and that the degree of improvement is inversely proportional to baseline performance. Young (19–23 years old) normal-hearing nonsmokers and elderly (61–80) nonsmokers with normal hearing between 500 and 2000 Hz received nicotine gum (6 mg) or placebo gum in a single-blind, randomized crossover design. Participants performed three experiments (frequency discrimination, frequency modulation identification, and intensity discrimination) before and after treatment. The perceptual differences were analyzed between pre- and post-treatment, as well as between post-treatment nicotine and placebo conditions as a function of pre-treatment baseline performance. Compared to pre-treatment performance, nicotine significantly improved frequency discrimination. Compared to placebo, nicotine significantly improved performance for intensity discrimination, and the improvement was more pronounced in the elderly with lower baseline performance. Nicotine had no effect on frequency modulation identification. Nicotine effects are task-dependent, reflecting possible interplays of subjects, tasks and neural mechanisms.

Cochlear implant (CI) users are usually poor at using timing information to detect changes in either pitch or sound location. This deficit occurs even for listeners with good speech perception and even when the speech processor is bypassed to present simple, idealized stimuli to one or more electrodes. The present article presents seven expert opinion pieces on the likely neural bases for these limitations, the extent to which they are modifiable by sensory experience and training, and the most promising ways to overcome them in future. The article combines insights from physiology and psychophysics in cochlear-implanted humans and animals, highlights areas of agreement and controversy, and proposes new experiments that could resolve areas of disagreement.

Complex broadband sounds are decomposed by the auditory filters into a series of relatively narrowband signals, each of which can be considered as a slowly varying envelope (E) superimposed on a more rapid temporal fine structure (TFS). Both E and TFS information are represented in the timing of neural discharges, although TFS information as defined here depends on phase locking to individual cycles of the stimulus waveform. This paper reviews the role played by TFS in masking, pitch perception, and speech perception and concludes that cues derived from TFS play an important role for all three. TFS may be especially important for the ability to “listen in the dips” of fluctuating background sounds when detecting nonspeech and speech signals. Evidence is reviewed suggesting that cochlear hearing loss reduces the ability to use TFS cues. The perceptual consequences of this, and reasons why it may happen, are discussed.

This study provides clear evidence that the human cognitive system automatically codes sound pitch spatially. The spatial-musical association of response codes (SMARC) effect, in which a high-pitched (low-pitched) tone facilitates an upper (lower) response, is considered to reflect the spatial coding of sound pitch. However, previous studies have not excluded the directional effects of sound localization. Because a high-pitched (low-pitched) tone is automatically misperceived as originating from a spatially high (low) location, the location of a perceived sound source might artificially elicit the SMARC effect. This study challenged this unresolved issue. Participants were trained to associate visual stimuli (novel contoured shapes) with sound pitches (high-pitched or low-pitched pure tones). After training, participants completed a discrimination task in which the vertically aligned keys were associated with the visual stimuli in the absence of sound. Even without sound, the SMARC effect was observed in response to the trained visual stimuli (Experiment 1 ). However, this sound-free SMARC effect was eliminated when training was omitted (Experiment 2 ). Therefore, the SMARC effect was observed based solely on the activation of sound imagery that was spatial.

Our motor system uses sensory feedback to keep desired performance. From this view, motor fluctuation is not simply ‘noise’ inevitably caused in the nervous system but would play a role in generating variations to explore better outcomes via sensory feedback. Vocalization system offers a good model for studying such sensory-motor interactions since we regulate vocalization by hearing our own voice. This behavior is typically observed as compensatory responses in vocalized pitch, or fundamental frequency ( f o ), when artificial f o shifts were induced in the auditory feedback. However, the relationship between adaptive regulation and motor exploration in vocalization has remained unclear. Here we investigated behavioral variability in spontaneous vocal f o and compensatory responses against f o shifts in the feedback, and demonstrated that larger spontaneous fluctuation correlates with greater compensation in vocal f o . This correlation was found in slow components (≤ 5 Hz) of the spontaneous fluctuation but not in fast components (between 6 and 30 Hz), and the slow one was amplified during the compensatory responses. Furthermore, the compensatory ratio was reduced when large f o shifts were applied to the auditory feedback, as if reflecting the range of motor exploration. All these findings consistently suggest the functional role of motor variability in the exploration of better vocal outcomes.