Temporal selectivity declines in the aging human auditory cortex

Abstract
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Abstract

Current models successfully describe the auditory cortical response to natural sounds with a set of spectro-temporal features. However, these models have hardly been linked to the ill-understood neurobiological changes that occur in the aging auditory cortex. Modelling the hemodynamic response to a rich natural sound mixture in N=64 listeners of varying age, we here show that in older listeners' auditory cortex, the key feature of temporal rate is represented with a markedly broader tuning. This loss of temporal selectivity is most prominent in primary auditory cortex and planum temporale, with no such changes in adjacent auditory or other brain areas. Amongst older listeners, we observe a direct relationship between chronological age and temporal-rate tuning, unconfounded by auditory acuity or model goodness of fit. In line with senescent neural dedifferentiation more generally, our results highlight decreased selectivity to temporal information as a hallmark of the aging auditory cortex.

Data availability

MRI data and custom code to reproduce all essential findings are publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF).

The following data sets were generated

(2020) GRASP
Open Science Framework DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/28R57.

https://osf.io/zbuah/

Article and author information

Author details

Julia Erb

Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

For correspondence
julia.erb@uni-luebeck.de

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3440-7269
Lea-Maria Schmitt

Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9356-2234
Jonas Obleser

Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

Competing interests
Jonas Obleser, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7619-0459

Funding

H2020 European Research Council (ERC-CoG-2014-646696 AUDADAPT"")

Jonas Obleser

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (OB 352/2-1)

Jonas Obleser

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants gave informed consent and were financially compensated or received course credit. All procedures were approved by the local ethics committee of the University of Lübeck (ethical approval AZ 16-107).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.