Auditory Cortical Plasticity in Learning to Discriminate Modulation Rate

Abstract

The discrimination of temporal information in acoustic inputs is a crucial aspect of auditory perception, yet very few studies have focused on auditory perceptual learning of timing properties and associated plasticity in adult auditory cortex. Here, we trained participants on a temporal discrimination task. The main task used a base stimulus (four tones separated by intervals of 200 ms) that had to be distinguished from a target stimulus (four tones with intervals down to ∼180 ms). We show that participants' auditory temporal sensitivity improves with a short amount of training (3 d, 1 h/d). Learning to discriminate temporal modulation rates was accompanied by a systematic amplitude increase of the early auditory evoked responses to trained stimuli, as measured by magnetoencephalography. Additionally, learning and auditory cortex plasticity partially generalized to interval discrimination but not to frequency discrimination. Auditory cortex plasticity associated with short-term perceptual learning was manifested as an enhancement of auditory cortical responses to trained acoustic features only in the trained task. Plasticity was also manifested as induced non-phase–locked high gamma-band power increases in inferior frontal cortex during performance in the trained task. Functional plasticity in auditory cortex is here interpreted as the product of bottom-up and top-down modulations.