Modulation of auditory cortex in a sound-generating button press task measured with 7T fMRI
Poster No:
1701
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Kevin Sitek1, Vaishak Harish2, Jason Bohland2
Institutions:
1Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 2University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Motor-induced suppression (MIS) is a well-known effect in which sensory responses evoked by a self-generated motor act are reduced relative to responses to the same input presented externally (Blakemore et al., 1998). Motor control theory suggests this effect is driven by internal models that use efference copies to cancel or suppress sensory signals during movements (Wolpert et al., 2001). Motor-induced suppression of the auditory cortex has been studied using EEG/MEG in humans producing speech (Houde et al., 2002) or generating sounds via button presses (Martikainen et al., 2005; Aliu et al., 2010). The evoked potentials typically used to characterize MIS offer limited anatomical specificity. Here, we examined MIS of the auditory cortex in a button-press task using high-resolution 7T fMRI. This enables an anatomically specific description of the modulation of motor and sensory regions related to MIS.
Methods:
6 neurotypical adults participated and completed 4-6 ~8.5-minute task-based runs. Each run included 3 conditions, presented pseudorandomly in 30s blocks: (1) SELFGEN: participants pressed a button, which elicited an immediate auditory stimulus (amplitude modulated white noise, 700 ms duration), (2) LISTEN: participants heard the same stimuli without a motor act, (3) MOTOR: participants made button presses without corresponding sounds. Participants were instructed to press the button once per trial (3s) in SELFGEN and MOTOR conditions and to passively listen in the LISTEN condition. 15s rest blocks were interspersed through each run. Auditory stimuli were presented via Sensimetrics S15 earphones. Button presses were elicited using an MRI-compatible response glove.
Data were acquired on a 7T Siemens MAGNETOM scanner with custom Tic Tac Toe RF head coil (60-channel Tx, 32-channel Rx; Krishnamurthy et al., 2019). T1-weighted MP2RAGE images were obtained at 0.55mm resolution. fMRI data were collected using a multiband (MB) EPI sequence (MB factor = 2, TR = 3s, TE = 22.8ms, flip angle = 72°, voxel size = 1mm isotropic, 80 slices). Paired spin-echo images with opposing phase encoding directions were collected to map distortions. Preprocessing was performed using fMRIPrep (v24.0.0; Esteban et al., 2019). Functional images were corrected for susceptibility distortions, aligned, and co-registered to T1 images. Data were normalized to the MNI152NLin2009cAsym template. fMRI data were smoothed with a 3mm Gaussian kernel. Subject-level analyses were conducted using nilearn (Abraham et al., 2014). A general linear model included regressors for LISTEN, SELFGEN, and MOTOR conditions and 24 motion parameters. Scans with >0.5 mm framewise displacement or >1.5 standardized DVARS were scrubbed (Power et al., 2014). Univariate contrasts were computed for individual participants and evaluated at the group level using 1-sample t-tests.
Data were acquired on a 7T Siemens MAGNETOM scanner with custom Tic Tac Toe RF head coil (60-channel Tx, 32-channel Rx; Krishnamurthy et al., 2019). T1-weighted MP2RAGE images were obtained at 0.55mm resolution. fMRI data were collected using a multiband (MB) EPI sequence (MB factor = 2, TR = 3s, TE = 22.8ms, flip angle = 72°, voxel size = 1mm isotropic, 80 slices). Paired spin-echo images with opposing phase encoding directions were collected to map distortions. Preprocessing was performed using fMRIPrep (v24.0.0; Esteban et al., 2019). Functional images were corrected for susceptibility distortions, aligned, and co-registered to T1 images. Data were normalized to the MNI152NLin2009cAsym template. fMRI data were smoothed with a 3mm Gaussian kernel. Subject-level analyses were conducted using nilearn (Abraham et al., 2014). A general linear model included regressors for LISTEN, SELFGEN, and MOTOR conditions and 24 motion parameters. Scans with >0.5 mm framewise displacement or >1.5 standardized DVARS were scrubbed (Power et al., 2014). Univariate contrasts were computed for individual participants and evaluated at the group level using 1-sample t-tests.
Results:
Across individuals, we found superior temporal cortex responses in the LISTEN and SELFGEN conditions and distributed motor, premotor, somatosensory, and inferior parietal responses in the MOTOR and SELFGEN conditions (Figure 1). Foci of activations varied greatly in our relatively small sample. Figure 2 shows results from the participant with strongest overall effects, demonstrating characteristic auditory and motor responses in the three conditions. In this participant, we found increased, primarily left hemisphere superior temporal activity for SELFGEN compared to LISTEN, in addition to increased motor and medial premotor activity.
·Figure 1: Baseline contrasts for A) LISTEN, B) MOTOR, and C) SELFGEN conditions evaluated at the group level. Results are presented at p<0.05, uncorrected. Colorscale shows z-score.
·Figure 2: Individual participant results for baseline contrasts (A-C) and for SELFGEN vs. LISTEN (D-E). All images thresholded to control false discovery rate at q<0.05. Colorscale indicates z-score.
Conclusions:
We identified increased auditory cortical BOLD signal for self-generated sounds compared to passively presented sounds within a single participant using 7T fMRI. This contrasts with common findings with EEG/MEG, which show suppressed auditory responses for self-generated sounds. These data provide further opportunity to examine cortical depth-dependent responses to characterize the feedforward vs. feedback mechanisms contributing to auditory processing of self-generated sounds.
Language:
Speech Production
Motor Behavior:
Motor Planning and Execution 1
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Perception: Auditory/ Vestibular 2
Keywords:
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Motor
Other - auditory; motor-induced suppression; efference copy; internal models
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
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