L N Hug | PubMed Health

PubMed1990

Neural responses to auditory temporal patterns.

Sets of regularly repeating auditory stimuli elicit unique perceptions; listeners are able to identify specific temporal patterns. Some temporal patterns are unambiguous (only one pattern can be perceived), while others are ambiguous (numerous patterns can be detected). While the psychophysical properties of such percepts have been well studied, little is known about the underlying neurological bases of temporal pattern perception. In this experiment, the role of adaptation in temporal pattern perception is examined by studying neural responses in four cats to a temporal pattern that is perceptually unambiguous and one that is perceptually ambiguous. Measurements were made of the whole-nerve action potential, the auditory brainstem response, and potentials from the surface of the primary auditory cortex. The adaptation patterns corresponded with the perceptual organization of temporal patterns in humans at all levels of the nervous system studied.

Animals↗

PubMed1989

Auditory temporal pattern learning in children with speech and language impairments.

Four children demonstrating speech and language impairments were examined with respect to their ability to learn to identify certain auditory temporal perceptual information. These children listened to six-element temporal patterns and made judgments about the temporal proximity of two of the elements. Subjects listened to the patterns over a number of exposures ranging from 6 to 14, depending on the subject. Performance on the task improved significantly with repeated exposures. However, the disordered subjects' best performance was still significantly poorer than normal children who had only 1 exposure to the task. These results suggest that, in part, performance differences on temporal perceptual tasks between speech and language disordered children and normal children can be accounted for by differences in perceptual learning. However, because the disordered children never reached normal levels, learning differences may be associated with a fundamental deficit in temporal processing or some other mechanism such as impaired attention.

Attention↗