From basic auditory processing to complex musical skills: a structural and functional perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sounds consist of pressure variations in the air; as such, they are only present in the moment and disappear immediately after they are produced, leaving only a trace in the nervous system. Thus, the processing of any auditory information requires the integration of events over time. This thesis consists of three neuroimaging studies that together converge on a broader understanding of the diverse auditory cortical networks that support the processing of temporal features of auditory stimuli. The three studies in this thesis were chosen to tap into three distinct types of auditory processes. Study 1 used a longitudinal design to investigate the developmental neuroanatomical correlates of 2 Hz frequency modulation processing, a skill previously shown to correlate with the phonological aspects of literacy abilities. Using voxel-based morphometry, we found that the frequency-modulation thresh- old was significantly correlated with grey-matter density in left Heschl’s gyrus at the age of 10 years, but that this correlation weakened with age. Additionally, we found that 2Hz frequency-modulation threshold significantly correlated with spelling abilities at this age, but only in the boys, who also showed a stronger correlation between frequency-modulation threshold and grey-matter density in left Heschl’s gyrus. These findings provide a neural basis for the hypothesis that 2 Hz frequency modulation processing directly relates to literacy abilities because the former relies on structures known to preferentially process dynamically changing temporal stimuli. The second study expanded the results of the first into the more complex task of melodic transposition. Using the same longitudinal design, we investigated whether the neuroanatomical correlate of musical transposition previously demonstrated in adults were present between the ages of 10 and 14.5 years. We found a relationship between cortical thickness in left intraparietal sulcus and performance on the transposed melody task in the 14.5 year-old girls but not in the 14.5 year-old boys; no such relationship was observed at the earlier tested ages (13, 11.5 and 10). We conclude that this relationship between structure and behavior is not fixed and that the effects observed in adults are due exclusively to neither training nor predisposition. The third study focused on the functional role of the intraparietal sulcus in systematic auditory transformations in adults. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a mental tempo-changing task to localize the cortical activity related to maintaining temporal invariance across acceleration and decelerations in tempo. The results showed that recruitment of the intraparietal sulcus is specifically related to successful mental transposition. The results of these three studies fill three distinct gaps in the neuroscientific literature on non-speech auditory processing and help develop a broad view of the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of both basic and complex auditory skills from adolescence to adulthood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".