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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on January 8, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn245
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Hemispheric Asymmetry of Auditory Evoked Fields Elicited by Spectral versus Temporal Stimulus Change

Hidehiko Okamoto, Henning Stracke, Rossitza Draganova and Christo Pantev

Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Muenster, 48149 Muenster, Germany

Address correspondence to Univ.-Prof. Dr Christo Pantev PhD, Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Muenster, Malmedyweg 15, 48149 Muenster, Germany. Email: pantev{at}uni-muenster.de.

The investigation of functional hemispheric asymmetries regarding auditory processing in the human brain still remains a challenge. Classical lesion and recent neuroimaging studies indicated that speech is dominantly processed in the left hemisphere, whereas music is dominantly processed in the right. However, recent studies demonstrated that the functional hemispheric asymmetries were not limited to the processing of highly cognitive sound signals like speech and music but rather originated from the basic neural processing of elementary sound features, that is, spectral and temporal acoustic features. Here, in contrast to previous studies, we used carefully composed tones and pulse trains as stimuli, balanced the overall physical sound input between spectral and temporal change conditions, and demonstrated the time course of neural activity evoked by spectral versus temporal sound input change by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG). These original findings support the hypothesis that spectral change is dominantly processed in the right hemisphere, whereas temporal change is dominantly processed in the left.

Key Words: amplitude-modulated tone • hemispheric laterality • human auditory cortex • magnetoencephalography (MEG) • pulse train


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