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Distribution of multiunit pitch responses recorded intracranially from human auditory cortex
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Distribution of multiunit pitch responses recorded intracranially from human auditory cortex

Joel I Berger, Phillip E Gander, Yukiko Kikuchi, Christopher I Petkov, Sukhbinder Kumar, Christopher Kovach, Hiroyuki Oya, Hiroto Kawasaki, Matthew A Howard and Timothy D Griffiths
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991), Vol.33(14), pp.9105-9116
07/15/2023
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhad186
PMCID: PMC10350829
PMID: 37246155
url
https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad186View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

The perception of pitch is a fundamental percept, which is mediated by the auditory system, requiring the abstraction of stimulus properties related to the spectro-temporal structure of sound. Despite its importance, there is still debate as to the precise areas responsible for its encoding, which may be due to species differences or differences in the recording measures and choices of stimuli used in previous studies. Moreover, it was unknown whether the human brain contains pitch neurons and how distributed such neurons might be. Here, we present the first study to measure multiunit neural activity in response to pitch stimuli in the auditory cortex of intracranially implanted humans. The stimulus sets were regular-interval noise with a pitch strength that is related to the temporal regularity and a pitch value determined by the repetition rate and harmonic complexes. Specifically, we demonstrate reliable responses to these different pitch-inducing paradigms that are distributed throughout Heschl's gyrus, rather than being localized to a particular region, and this finding was evident regardless of the stimulus presented. These data provide a bridge across animal and human studies and aid our understanding of the processing of a critical percept associated with acoustic stimuli.
sensory intracranial harmonic iEEG perception

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