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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 2, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj148
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Article

Evidence of Functional Connectivity between Auditory Cortical Areas Revealed by Amplitude Modulation Sound Processing

Marie Guéguin 1 *, Régine Le Bouquin-Jeannès 1, Gérard Faucon 1, Patrick Chauvel 2, and Catherine Liégeois-Chauvel 2

1 Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), U642, Laboratoire Traitement du Signal et de l'Image, Rennes, France; Université de Rennes 1, LTSI, Campus de Beaulieu, Rennes 35042 Cedex, France
2 INSERM, U751, Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie et Neuropsychologie Hôpital la Timone, Marseille, France

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Marie Guéguin, E-mail: marie.gueguin{at}univ-rennes1.fr


  Abstract

The human auditory cortex includes several interconnected areas. A better understanding of the mechanisms involved in auditory cortical functions requires a detailed knowledge of neuronal connectivity between functional cortical regions. In human, it is difficult to track in vivo neuronal connectivity. We investigated the interarea connection in vivo in the auditory cortex using a method of directed coherence (DCOH) applied to depth auditory evoked potentials (AEPs). This paper presents simultaneous AEPs recordings from insular gyrus (IG), primary and secondary cortices (Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale), and associative areas (Brodmann area [BA] 22) with multilead intracerebral electrodes in response to sinusoidal modulated white noises in 4 epileptic patients who underwent invasive monitoring with depth electrodes for epilepsy surgery. DCOH allowed estimation of the causality between 2 signals recorded from different cortical sites. The results showed 1) a predominant auditory stream within the primary auditory cortex from the most medial region to the most lateral one whatever the modulation frequency, 2) unidirectional functional connection from the primary to secondary auditory cortex, 3) a major auditory propagation from the posterior areas to the anterior ones, particularly at 8, 16, and 32 Hz, and 4) a particular role of Heschl's sulcus dispatching information to the different auditory areas. These findings suggest that cortical processing of auditory information is performed in serial and parallel streams. Our data showed that the auditory propagation could not be associated to a unidirectional traveling wave but to a constant interaction between these areas that could reflect the large adaptive and plastic capacities of auditory cortex. The role of the IG is discussed.

Keywords: amplitude-modulated sounds; auditory cortical areas; directed coherence; human; propagation.
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