Congenital auditory deprivation leads to deficits in the auditory cortex. The present review focuses on central aspects of auditory deprivation: development, plasticity, corticocortical interactions, and cross-modal reorganization. We compile imaging data from human subjects, electroencephalographic data from cochlear implanted children, and animal research on congenital deafness. Behavioral, e...

Hierarchical models of auditory processing often posit that optimal stimuli, i.e., those eliciting a maximal neural response, will increase in bandwidth and decrease in modulation rate as one ascends the auditory neuraxis. Here, we tested how bandwidth and modulation rate interact at several loci along the human central auditory pathway using functional MRI in a cardiac-gated, sparse acquisitio...

Research on the neural basis of speech-reading implicates a network of auditory language regions involving inferior frontal cortex, premotor cortex and sites along superior temporal cortex. In audiovisual speech studies, neural activity is consistently reported in posterior superior temporal Sulcus (pSTS) and this site has been implicated in multimodal integration. Traditionally, multisensory i...

We have used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in sighted and congenitally blind subjects performing auditory localization tasks. During scanning, the spectral and binaural cues of localized sound were reproduced by a sound system and delivered via headphones. During tasks that required auditory localization both the sighted and blind subjects str...

The patterns of cortico-cortical and cortico-thalamic connections of auditory cortical areas in the rhesus monkey have led to the hypothesis that acoustic information is processed in series and in parallel in the primate auditory cortex. Recent physiological experiments in the behaving monkey indicate that the response properties of neurons in different cortical areas are both functionally dist...

Extensive fear extinction research is guided by the view that there are structures in the brain that develop inhibitory control over the expression of conditioned fear memories. While the medial prefrontal cortex has recently captured attention as the locus of plasticity essential for extinction of conditioned fear, the auditory cortex is another plausible cortical area involved in extinction l...