1. Neuroscience
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Temporo-cerebellar connectivity underlies timing constraints in audition

  1. Anika Stockert
  2. Michael Schwartze
  3. David Poeppel
  4. Alfred Anwander
  5. Sonja Kotz  Is a corresponding author
  1. University of Leipzig, Germany
  2. Maastricht University, Netherlands
  3. Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany
  4. Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
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Cite this article as: eLife 2021;10:e67303 doi: 10.7554/eLife.67303

Abstract

The flexible and efficient adaptation to dynamic, rapid changes in the auditory environment likely involves generating and updating of internal models. Such models arguably exploit connections between the neocortex and the cerebellum, supporting proactive adaptation. Here we tested whether temporo-cerebellar disconnection is associated with the processing of sound at short-timescales. First, we identify lesion-specific deficits for the encoding of short timescale spectro-temporal non-speech and speech properties in patients with left posterior temporal cortex stroke. Second, using lesion- guided probabilistic tractography in healthy participants, we revealed bidirectional temporo-cerebellar connectivity with cerebellar dentate nuclei and crura I/II. These findings support the view that the encoding and modeling of rapidly modulated auditory spectro-temporal properties can rely on a temporo-cerebellar interface. We discuss these findings in view of the conjecture that proactive adaptation to a dynamic environment via internal models is a generalizable principle.

Data availability

There is restricted access to the data due to German legal regulations of patient protection.We have made all data which we can legally share accessible via figure share (link is included in the resource statement). We have provided all data (lesion data, scripts, behavioral data that allowed lesion-symptom mapping) in our figure share account for reproduction of the critical seed region for a tracking analysis.Anonymisation of MRI/DTI data is not allowed either through the ethics agreement nor the participants' consent. We cannot do anything about this as these are the legal regulations that we have to deal with. We have made a clear statement that we seek open dialogue about how we have analysed our data. Further, given the data that we have provided, any interested researcher can (1) approach us about our analysis, (2) can take a set of open source age-matched structural MRI/DTI data to replicated our results

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Anika Stockert

    Department of Neurology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  2. Michael Schwartze

    Neuropsyhology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. David Poeppel

    Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  4. Alfred Anwander

    Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4861-4808

  5. Sonja Kotz

    Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands
    For correspondence
    sonja.kotz@maastrichtuniversity.nl
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5894-4624

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG KO 2268/6-1)

  • Sonja Kotz

Dissertation award University of Leipzig (none)

  • Anika Stockert

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (none)

  • Sonja Kotz

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

Ethics

Human subjects: The protocol of the current research was approved by the ethics committee of the University of Leipzig, Germany (Protocol Number: 953). All participants provided written, informed consent before the start of data collection.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Timothy D Griffiths, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom

Publication history

  1. Preprint posted: February 7, 2021 (view preprint)
  2. Received: February 7, 2021
  3. Accepted: September 9, 2021
  4. Accepted Manuscript published: September 20, 2021 (version 1)
  5. Version of Record published: September 29, 2021 (version 2)
  6. Version of Record updated: September 30, 2021 (version 3)

Copyright

© 2021, Stockert et al.

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.

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