Didn’t hear? “Heard”: Evidence from auditory imagery neural mechanisms

LIANG Bi-Shan; LIU Ming; HUANG Xi-Shan

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (6) : 1312-1316.

Didn’t hear? “Heard”: Evidence from auditory imagery neural mechanisms

¹, Xi-Shan HUANG

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Abstract

Auditory imagery is the introspective persistence of an auditory experience, including one constructed from components drawn from long-term memory, in the absence of direct sensory instigation of that experience. In recent years, researchers became much more concern about the study of auditory imagery. According to the kinds of sounds that can generate the auditory imagery, we classified auditory imagery researches into three types, verbal auditory imagery, musical auditory imagery and environmental auditory imagery. With the development of modern technology and cognitive neuroscience, researchers explored the activated brain areas when the auditory imagery emerged from these three different types of sounds. Recent finds of verbal auditory imagery suggested that auditory cortex and brain regions associated with attention, verbal monitoring and articulation were more activated when healthy subjects imaged verbal stimuli, while patients with schizophrenia who were prone to verbal hallucinations which Broca and Wernicke areas increased activity exhibited an attenuated deactivation in left superior temporal gyrus which was associated with verbal monitoring. It implicated that the left superior temporal gyrus was one of the key regions through which healthy people can discriminate verbal imagery from auditory stimuli. In musical auditory imagery researches, the superior temporal gyrus, as well as areas of the frontal lobe, parietal lobe and supplementary motor area were activated in musical auditory imagery and represented hemispheric processing asymmetries. Further, there were evidences that parietal cortex played an important role in mental reversal of imagined melodies as well as other mental transformation tasks, such as mental rotation in the visual imagery. In addition, EEG studies showed that musical auditory imagery interacted with music perception and encoded pitch and loudness information of music. There was existence of hemispheric processing asymmetries in environmental auditory imagery which depended on the secondary auditory cortex rather than the primary auditory cortex. And we compared the similarities and differences of the brain areas between auditory imagery and auditory perception. There were large numbers of brain regions overlap between auditory imagery and perception, but not all. At the end, there is some advice for the further researches. Obviously, researchers attempted to find out the association of auditory imagery and perception. Although they were similar in the neural mechanism, they were different, which we should unfold the specific mechanism of auditory imagery. Auditory imagery is an important element of cognitive processing related to language, music, and other environmental stimuli, but the studies of environmental auditory imagery are deficient. Moreover, auditory imagery activated brain regions associated with other cognitive processes, such as attention, memory and self-control. It indicated auditory imagery had common connection with other cognition function. It is worthy to explore the relationships between auditory imagery and other cognitive processes for elucidating the main mechanism of auditory imagery. Notably, there were substantial findings of mental transformation in visual imagery, while it was limited in auditory imagery which was a crucial skill to music implement. Finally, studies of auditory imagery neural mechanism have its clinical application value since abnormalities in cognitive processing related to auditory imagery are exhibited in or contribute to psychopathology.

Key words

verbal sounds auditory imagery / musical sounds auditory imagery / environmental sounds auditory imagery / neural mechanisms

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Xi-Shan HUANG. Didn’t hear? “Heard”: Evidence from auditory imagery neural mechanisms[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(6): 1312-1316

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