scholarly journals Hierarchy of speech-driven spectrotemporal receptive fields in human auditory cortex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Henry Venezia ◽  
Steven Matthew Thurman ◽  
Virginia Richards ◽  
Gregory Hickok

Existing data indicate that cortical speech processing is hierarchically organized. Numerous studies have shown that early auditory areas encode fine acoustic details while later areas encode abstracted speech patterns. However, it remains unclear precisely what speech information is encoded across these hierarchical levels. Estimation of speech-driven spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) provides a means to explore cortical speech processing in terms of acoustic or linguistic information associated with characteristic spectrotemporal patterns. Here, we estimate STRFs from cortical responses to continuous speech in fMRI. Using a novel approach based on filtering randomly-selected spectrotemporal modulations (STMs) from aurally-presented sentences, STRFs were estimated for a group of listeners and categorized using a data-driven clustering algorithm. ‘Behavioral STRFs’ highlighting STMs crucial for speech recognition were derived from intelligibility judgments. Clustering revealed that STRFs in the supratemporal plane represented a broad range of STMs, while STRFs in the lateral temporal lobe represented circumscribed STM patterns important to intelligibility. Detailed analysis recovered a bilateral organization with posterior-lateral regions preferentially processing STMs associated with phonological information and anterior-lateral regions preferentially processing STMs associated with word- and phrase-level information. Regions in lateral Heschl’s gyrus preferentially processed STMs associated with vocalic information (pitch).

2013 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain de Cheveigné ◽  
Jean-Marc Edeline ◽  
Quentin Gaucher ◽  
Boris Gourévitch

Local field potentials (LFPs) recorded in the auditory cortex of mammals are known to reveal weakly selective and often multimodal spectrotemporal receptive fields in contrast to spiking activity. This may in part reflect the wider “listening sphere” of LFPs relative to spikes due to the greater current spread at low than high frequencies. We recorded LFPs and spikes from auditory cortex of guinea pigs using 16-channel electrode arrays. LFPs were processed by a component analysis technique that produces optimally tuned linear combinations of electrode signals. Linear combinations of LFPs were found to have sharply tuned responses, closer to spike-related tuning. The existence of a sharply tuned component implies that a cortical neuron (or group of neurons) capable of forming a linear combination of its inputs has access to that information. Linear combinations of signals from electrode arrays reveal information latent in the subspace spanned by multichannel LFP recordings and are justified by the fact that the observations themselves are linear combinations of neural sources.


2010 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 784-798 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noopur Amin ◽  
Patrick Gill ◽  
Frédéric E. Theunissen

We estimated the spectrotemporal receptive fields of neurons in the songbird auditory thalamus, nucleus ovoidalis, and compared the neural representation of complex sounds in the auditory thalamus to those found in the upstream auditory midbrain nucleus, mesencephalicus lateralis dorsalis (MLd), and the downstream auditory pallial region, field L. Our data refute the idea that the primary sensory thalamus acts as a simple, relay nucleus: we find that the auditory thalamic receptive fields obtained in response to song are more complex than the ones found in the midbrain. Moreover, we find that linear tuning diversity and complexity in ovoidalis (Ov) are closer to those found in field L than in MLd. We also find prevalent tuning to intermediate spectral and temporal modulations, a feature that is unique to Ov. Thus even a feed-forward model of the sensory processing chain, where neural responses in the sensory thalamus reveals intermediate response properties between those in the sensory periphery and those in the primary sensory cortex, is inadequate in describing the tuning found in Ov. Based on these results, we believe that the auditory thalamic circuitry plays an important role in generating novel complex representations for specific features found in natural sounds.


Author(s):  
Pengcheng Wang ◽  
Jonathan Rowe ◽  
Wookhee Min ◽  
Bradford Mott ◽  
James Lester

Interactive narrative planning offers significant potential for creating adaptive gameplay experiences. While data-driven techniques have been devised that utilize player interaction data to induce policies for interactive narrative planners, they require enormously large gameplay datasets. A promising approach to addressing this challenge is creating simulated players whose behaviors closely approximate those of human players. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generating high-fidelity simulated players based on deep recurrent highway networks and deep convolutional networks. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed models significantly outperform the prior state-of-the-art in generating high-fidelity simulated player models that accurately imitate human players’ narrative interactions. Using the high-fidelity simulated player models, we show the advantage of more exploratory reinforcement learning methods for deriving generalizable narrative adaptation policies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.16) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Gaurav Makwana ◽  
Lalita Gupta

Breast cancer is most common disease in women of all ages. To identify & confirm the state of tumor in breast cancer diagnosis, patients are undergo biopsy number of times to identify malignancy. Early detection of cancer can save the patient. In this paper a novel approach for automatic segmentation & classification of breast calcification is proposed. The diagnostic test technique for detection of breast condition is very costly & requires human expertise whereas proposed method can help in automatically identifying the disease by comparing the data with the standard database. In proposed method a database has been created to define various stage of breast calcification & testing images are pre-processed to resize, enhance & filtered to remove background noise. Clustering is performed by using k-means clustering algorithm. GLCM is used to extract out statistical feature like area, mean, variance, standard deviation, homogeneity, skewness etc. to classify the state of tumor. SVM classifier is used for the classification using extracted feature. 


2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Zhihuan Wang ◽  
Chenguang Meng ◽  
Mengyuan Yao ◽  
Christophe Claramunt

Maritime ports are critical logistics hubs that play an important role when preventing the transmission of COVID-19-imported infections from incoming international-going ships. This study introduces a data-driven method to dynamically model infection risks of international ports from imported COVID-19 cases. The approach is based on global Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and a spatio-temporal clustering algorithm that both automatically identifies ports and countries approached by ships and correlates them with country COVID-19 statistics and stopover dates. The infection risk of an individual ship is firstly modeled by considering the current number of COVID-19 cases of the approached countries, increase rate of the new cases, and ship capacity. The infection risk of a maritime port is mainly calculated as the aggregation of the risks of all of the ships stopovering at a specific date. This method is applied to track the risk of the imported COVID-19 of the main cruise ports worldwide. The results show that the proposed method dynamically estimates the risk level of the overseas imported COVID-19 of cruise ports and has the potential to provide valuable support to improve prevention measures and reduce the risk of imported COVID-19 cases in seaports.


2011 ◽  
Vol 106 (2) ◽  
pp. 500-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph W. Schumacher ◽  
David M. Schneider ◽  
Sarah M. N. Woolley

The majority of sensory physiology experiments have used anesthesia to facilitate the recording of neural activity. Current techniques allow researchers to study sensory function in the context of varying behavioral states. To reconcile results across multiple behavioral and anesthetic states, it is important to consider how and to what extent anesthesia plays a role in shaping neural response properties. The role of anesthesia has been the subject of much debate, but the extent to which sensory coding properties are altered by anesthesia has yet to be fully defined. In this study we asked how urethane, an anesthetic commonly used for avian and mammalian sensory physiology, affects the coding of complex communication vocalizations (songs) and simple artificial stimuli in the songbird auditory midbrain. We measured spontaneous and song-driven spike rates, spectrotemporal receptive fields, and neural discriminability from responses to songs in single auditory midbrain neurons. In the same neurons, we recorded responses to pure tone stimuli ranging in frequency and intensity. Finally, we assessed the effect of urethane on population-level representations of birdsong. Results showed that intrinsic neural excitability is significantly depressed by urethane but that spectral tuning, single neuron discriminability, and population representations of song do not differ significantly between unanesthetized and anesthetized animals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-57
Author(s):  
Weifeng Pan ◽  
Xinxin Xu ◽  
Hua Ming ◽  
Carl K. Chang

Mashup technology has become a promising way to develop and deliver applications on the web. Automatically organizing Mashups into functionally similar clusters helps improve the performance of Mashup discovery. Although there are many approaches aiming to cluster Mashups, they solely focus on utilizing semantic similarities to guide the Mashup clustering process and are unable to utilize both the structural and semantic information in Mashup profiles. In this paper, a novel approach to cluster Mashups into groups is proposed, which integrates structural similarity and semantic similarity using fuzzy AHP (fuzzy analytic hierarchy process). The structural similarity is computed from usage histories between Mashups and Web APIs using SimRank algorithm. The semantic similarity is computed from the descriptions and tags of Mashups using LDA (latent dirichlet allocation). A clustering algorithm based on the genetic algorithm is employed to cluster Mashups. Comprehensive experiments are performed on a real data set collected from ProgrammableWeb. The results show the effectiveness of the approach when compared with two kinds of conventional approaches.


Author(s):  
J. K. Mandal ◽  
Somnath Mukhopadhyay

This chapter deals with a novel approach which aims at detection and filtering of impulses in digital images through unsupervised classification of pixels. This approach coagulates directional weighted median filtering with unsupervised pixel classification based adaptive window selection toward detection and filtering of impulses in digital images. K-means based clustering algorithm has been utilized to detect the noisy pixels based adaptive window selection to restore the impulses. Adaptive median filtering approach has been proposed to obtain best possible restoration results. Results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed technique are provided for numeric intensity values described in terms of feature vectors. Various benchmark digital images are used to show the restoration results in terms of PSNR (dB) and visual effects which conform better restoration of images through proposed technique.


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