Usage of change-related non-invasive imaging paradigms to investigate the representation of sound in the human brain

To efficiently recognize and localize sounds is of paramount importance for our everyday life. However, the computational processes that underlie these capabilities in the human brain are still not fully understood. A powerful tool to study the representation and transformation of sensory information in the human brain are change-related paradigms. This text reviews three recent examples from our lab that employed change-related paradigms with different brain imaging modalities to characterize the representation of sounds in the human brain. Specifically, a first experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging and signal response suppression after stimulus repetition to characterize the representation of natural sounds. A second magnetoencephalo-graphic experiment, used a two-tone paradigm to describe the time-course of adaptation to natural sounds. In a third experiment, we employed a spatial mismatch negativity oddball paradigm during electroencephalography to test for head-related versus allocentric representation of sound sources in the human brain.