Separate neural subsystems support goal-directed speech listening

Separate neural subsystems support goal-directed speech listening

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How do humans excel at tracking the narrative of a particular speaker with a distracting noisy background? This feat places great demands on the collaboration between speech processing and goal-related regulatory functions.Here, we propose that separate subsystems with different cross-task dynamic activity properties and distinct functional purposes support goal-directed speech listening.We adopted a naturalistic dichotic speech listening paradigm in which listeners were instructed to attend to only one narrative from two competing inputs.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with inter- and intra-subject correlation techniques, we discovered a dissociation in response consistency in temporal, parietal and frontal brain areas as the task demand varied.Specifically, some areas in the bilateral temporal cortex (SomMotB_Aud and TempPar) and lateral prefrontal cortex (DefaultB_PFCl zippy paws adventure backpack and ContA_PFCl) always copyright tiki mug showed consistent activation across subjects and across scan runs, regardless of the task demand.In contrast, some areas in the parietal cortex (DefaultA_pCunPCC and ContC_pCun) responded reliably only when the task goal remained the same.

These results suggested two dissociated functional neural networks that were independently validated by performing a data-driven clustering analysis of voxelwise functional connectivity patterns.A subsequent meta-analysis revealed distinct functional profiles for these two brain correlation maps.The different-task correlation map was strongly associated with language-related processes (e.

g., listening, speech and sentences), whereas the same-task versus different-task correlation map was linked to self-referencing functions (e.g.

, default mode, theory of mind and autobiographical topics).Altogether, the three-pronged findings revealed two anatomically and functionally dissociated subsystems supporting goal-directed speech listening.