Fundamentals Of Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience

Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience: A Beginner's Guide, Second Edition, is a comprehensive, yet accessible, beginner’s guide on cognitive neuroscience. This text takes a distinctive, commonsense approach to help newcomers easily learn the basics of how the brain functions when we learn, act, feel, speak and socialize. This updated edition includes contents and features that are both academically rigorous and engaging, including a step-by-step introduction to the visible brain, colorful brain illustrations, and new chapters on emerging topics in cognition research, including emotion, sleep and disorders of consciousness, and discussions of novel findings that highlight cognitive neuroscience’s practical applications. Written by two leading experts in the field and thoroughly updated, this book remains an indispensable introduction to the study of cognition. Presents an easy-to-read introduction to mind-brain science based on a simple functional diagram linked to specific brain functions Provides new, up-to-date, colorful brain images directly from research labs Contains "In the News" boxes that describe the newest research and augment foundational content Includes both a student and instructor website with basic terms and definitions, chapter guides, study questions, drawing exercises, downloadable lecture slides, test bank, flashcards, sample syllabi and links to multimedia resources

An integrated overview of hearing and the interplay of physical, biological, and psychological processes underlying it. Every time we listen—to speech, to music, to footsteps approaching or retreating—our auditory perception is the result of a long chain of diverse and intricate processes that unfold within the source of the sound itself, in the air, in our ears, and, most of all, in our brains. Hearing is an "everyday miracle" that, despite its staggering complexity, seems effortless. This book offers an integrated account of hearing in terms of the neural processes that take place in different parts of the auditory system. Because hearing results from the interplay of so many physical, biological, and psychological processes, the book pulls together the different aspects of hearing—including acoustics, the mathematics of signal processing, the physiology of the ear and central auditory pathways, psychoacoustics, speech, and music—into a coherent whole.

Hearing and understanding sound- auditory processing- greatly enriches everyday life and enhances our ability to perform many tasks essential to survival. The complex soundscape in which we live influences where we direct our attention, how we communicate with each other, and how we interact with technological systems. Auditory Cognition and Human

Hearing and communication present a variety of challenges to the nervous system. To be heard and understood, a communication signal must be transformed from a time-varying acoustic waveform to a perceptual representation to an even more abstract representation that integrates memory stores with semantic/referential information. Finally, this complex, abstract representation must be interpreted to form categorical decisions that guide behavior. Did I hear the stimulus? From where and whom did it come? What does it tell me? How can I use this information to plan an action? All of these issues and questions underlie auditory cognition. Since the early 1990s, there has been a re-birth of studies that test the neural correlates of auditory cognition with a unique emphasis on the use of awake, behaving animals as model. Continuing today, how and where in the brain neural correlates of auditory cognition are formed is an intensive and active area of research. Importantly, our understanding of the role that the cortex plays in hearing has the potential to impact the next generation of cochlear- and brainstem-auditory implants and consequently help those with hearing impairments. Thus, it is timely to produce a volume that brings together this exciting literature on the neural correlates of auditory cognition. This volume compliments and extends many recent SHAR volumes such as Sound Source Localization (2005) Auditory Perception of Sound Sources (2007), and Human Auditory Cortex (2010). For example, in many of these volumes, similar issues are discussed such as auditory-object identification and perception with different emphases: in Auditory Perception of Sound Sources, authors discuss the underlying psychophysics/behavior, whereas in the Human Auditory Cortex, fMRI data are presented. The unique contribution of the proposed volume is that the authors will integrate both of these factors to highlight the neural correlates of cognition/behavior. Moreover, unlike other these other volumes, the neurophysiological data will emphasize the exquisite spatial and temporal resolution of single-neuron [as opposed to more coarse fMRI or MEG data] responses in order to reveal the elegant representations and computations used by the nervous system.

We live in a complex and dynamically changing acoustic environment. To this end, the auditory cortex of humans has developed the ability to process a remarkable amount of diverse acoustic information with apparent ease. In fact, a phylogenetic comparison of auditory systems reveals that human auditory association cortex in particular has undergone extensive changes relative to that of other species, although our knowledge of this remains incomplete. In contrast to other senses, human auditory cortex receives input that is highly pre-processed in a number of sub-cortical structures; this suggests that even primary auditory cortex already performs quite complex analyses. At the same time, much of the functional role of the various sub-areas in human auditory cortex is still relatively unknown, and a more sophisticated understanding is only now emerging through the use of contemporary electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. The integration of results across the various techniques signify a new era in our knowledge of how human auditory cortex forms basis for auditory experience. This volume on human auditory cortex will have two major parts. In Part A, the principal methodologies currently used to investigate human auditory cortex will be discussed. Each chapter will first outline how the methodology is used in auditory neuroscience, highlighting the challenges of obtaining data from human auditory cortex; second, each methods chapter will provide two or (at most) three brief examples of how it has been used to generate a major result about auditory processing. In Part B, the central questions for auditory processing in human auditory cortex are covered. Each chapter can draw on all the methods introduced in Part A but will focus on a major computational challenge the system has to solve. This volume will constitute an important contemporary reference work on human auditory cortex. Arguably, this will be the first and most focused book on this critical neurological structure. The combination of different methodological and experimental approaches as well as a diverse range of aspects of human auditory perception ensures that this volume will inspire novel insights and spurn future research.

This book considers deafness as a medical condition, exploring the neuronal consequences on the peripheral and the central nervous system as well as on cognition and learning, viewed from the standpoint of genetics, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, molecular biology, systems neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience.