TY - JOUR TI - Modulation of tonotopic ventral medial geniculate body is behaviorally relevant for speech recognition AU - Mihai, Paul Glad AU - Moerel, Michelle AU - de Martino, Federico AU - Trampel, Robert AU - Kiebel, Stefan AU - von Kriegstein, Katharina A2 - Griffiths, Timothy D A2 - King, Andrew J A2 - Griffiths, Timothy D A2 - Davis, Matthew H VL - 8 PY - 2019 DA - 2019/08/27 SP - e44837 C1 - eLife 2019;8:e44837 DO - 10.7554/eLife.44837 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.44837 AB - Sensory thalami are central sensory pathway stations for information processing. Their role for human cognition and perception, however, remains unclear. Recent evidence suggests an involvement of the sensory thalami in speech recognition. In particular, the auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body, MGB) response is modulated by speech recognition tasks and the amount of this task-dependent modulation is associated with speech recognition abilities. Here, we tested the specific hypothesis that this behaviorally relevant modulation is present in the MGB subsection that corresponds to the primary auditory pathway (i.e., the ventral MGB [vMGB]). We used ultra-high field 7T fMRI to identify the vMGB, and found a significant positive correlation between the amount of task-dependent modulation and the speech recognition performance across participants within left vMGB, but not within the other MGB subsections. These results imply that modulation of thalamic driving input to the auditory cortex facilitates speech recognition. KW - ventral MGB KW - thalamus KW - speech KW - top-down modulation KW - 7T fMRI KW - auditory JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -