Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 5, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(5):1074-1084; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl018
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Changes in Auditory Cortex Parallel Rapid Perceptual Learning
1 Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Toronto M6A 2E1, Canada, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, St George Campus M8V 2S4, Canada, 3 Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA
Address correspondence to Claude Alain, PhD, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario M6A 2E1, Canada. Email: calain{at}rotman-baycrest.on.ca.
Learning perceptual skills is characterized by rapid improvements in performance within the first hour of training (fast perceptual learning) followed by more gradual improvements that take place over several daily practice sessions (slow perceptual learning). Although it is widely accepted that slow perceptual learning is accompanied by enhanced stimulus representation in sensory cortices, there is considerable controversy about the neural substrates underlying early and rapid improvements in learning perceptual skills. Here we measured event-related brain potentials while listeners were presented with 2 phonetically different vowels. Listeners' ability to identify both vowels improved gradually during the first hour of testing and was paralleled by enhancements in an early evoked response (
130 ms) localized in the right auditory cortex and a late evoked response (340 ms) localized in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus and/or inferior prefrontal cortex. These neuroplastic changes depended on listeners' attention and were preserved only if practice was continued; familiarity with the task structure (procedural learning) was not sufficient. We propose that the early increases in cortical responsiveness reflect goal-directed changes in the tuning properties of auditory neurons involved in parsing concurrent speech signals. Importantly, the neuroplastic changes occurred rapidly, demonstrating the flexibility of human speech segregation mechanisms.
Key Words: attention • auditory cortex • evoked potential • learning • plasticity • speech • streaming
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