Preprint
Listening to the room: disrupting activity of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex impairs learning of room acoustics in human listeners
bioRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
04/05/2025
DOI: 10.1101/2025.04.04.644835
Abstract
Navigating complex sensory environments is critical to survival, and brain mechanisms have evolved to cope with the wide range of surroundings we encounter. To determine how listeners learn the statistical properties of acoustic spaces, we assessed their ability to perceive speech in a range of noisy and reverberant rooms. Listeners were also exposed to repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS) to disrupt the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity, a region believed to play a role in statistical learning. Our data suggest listeners rapidly adapt to statistical characteristics of an environment to improve speech understanding. This ability is impaired when rTMS is applied bilaterally to the dlPFC. The data demonstrate that speech understanding in noise is best when exposed to a room with reverberant characteristics common to human-built environments, with performance declining for higher and lower reverberation times, including fully anechoic (non-reverberant) environments. Our findings provide evidence for a reverberation “sweet spot” and the presence of brain mechanisms that might have evolved to cope with the acoustic characteristics of listening environments encountered every day.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Listening to the room: disrupting activity of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex impairs learning of room acoustics in human listeners
- Creators
- Heivet Hernandez-Perez - Macquarie UniversityJason Mikiel-Hunter - Macquarie UniversityJames Traer - University of IowaJessica J M Monaghan - National Acoustic LaboratoriesPaul F Sowman - Macquarie UniversityDavid McAlpine - Macquarie University
- Resource Type
- Preprint
- Publication Details
- bioRxiv
- DOI
- 10.1101/2025.04.04.644835
- Publisher
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- Language
- English
- Date posted
- 04/05/2025
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
- Record Identifier
- 9984806118802771
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