1.2 The Gap, Top-Down Control of Auditory Streams

In environments with competing sounds, the brain cannot attend to all auditory input simultaneously. Top-down attention functions as a control mechanism that filters relevant information and suppresses distractors - therefore focussing on few inputs in a goal-directed manner (De Vries & Baldauf (2021) - Journal of Neuroscience). The key question is: Which prefrontal regions act as the top-down controllers of these auditory streams?

The division into dorsal and ventral pathways is well-documented(Ahveninen et al. (2006) - PNAS, Hickok & Poeppel 2007 - Nature), which already sets the path for following the question about the top-down attention mechanisms. Existing work has identified IFG subregions as frontal nodes in auditory processing, particularly BA44 and BA45 within the semantic pathway (Rolls et al. (2023) - Cerebral Cortex) and BA44 also along the dorsal pathway for affective prosody (Frühholz (2015) - NeuroImage). Hickok & Poeppel 2007 - Nature described a dorsal pathway including the Spt - a region at the parietotemporal boundary within the Sylvian fissure - as a sensorimotor interface, connecting anteriorly to Broca’s region and premotor cortex. Hickok & Poeppel 2007 - Nature. However, these findings remain specific to the language-related dorsal prosody processing or the semantic ‘what’-stream. Especially the auditory ‘where’-stream lacks a clear prefrontal controller. The question of whether the FEF and IFJa also direct the auditory domain in a similar fashion to the visual system remains unanswered.

Notes & Scrapbook

Hier Dinge abladen, die noch keinen Platz im Text haben, damit der Schreibfluss nicht stoppt.

see also

1.1. The Auditory Dual-Stream Framework
1.3 Hypothesis, A supramodal organization