Topographic mapping of a hierarchy of temporal receptive windows using a narrated story

By Yulia Lerner, Christopher J. Honey, Lauren J. Silbert, Uri Hasson. 2011

805 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Real-life activities, such as watching a movie or engaging in conversation, unfold over many minutes. In the course of such activities, the brain has to integrate information over multiple time scales. We recently proposed that the brain uses similar strategies for integrating information across space and over time. Drawing a parallel with spatial receptive fields, we defined the temporal receptive window (TRW) of a cortical microcircuit as the length of time before a response during which sensory information may affect that response. Our previous findings in the visual system are consistent with the hypothesis that TRWs become larger when moving from low-level sensory to high-level perceptual and cognitive areas. In this study, we mapped TRWs in auditory and language areas by measuring fMRI activity in subjects listening to a real-life story scrambled at the time scales of words, sentences, and paragraphs. Our results revealed a hierarchical topography of TRWs. In early auditory cortices (A1+), brain responses were driven mainly by the momentary incoming input and were similarly reliable across all scrambling conditions. In areas with an intermediate TRW, coherent information at the sentence time scale or longer was necessary to evoke reliable responses. At the apex of the TRW hierarchy, we found parietal and frontal areas that responded reliably only when intact paragraphs were heard in a meaningful sequence. These results suggest that the time scale of processing is a functional property that may provide a general organizing principle for the human cerebral cortex.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Emergence of multimodal action representations from neural network self-organization (2017, background): “Keywords: Human action recognition; multimodal integration; self-organizing neural networks”
Interpreting and improving natural-language processing (in machines) with natural language-processing (in the brain) (2019, methodology): “A few researchers instead use naturalistic stimulus such as stories (Brennan et al., 2010; Lerner et al., 2011; Speer et al., 2009; Wehbe et al., 2014b; Huth et al., 2016; Blank and Fedorenko, 2017).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “…the cortical circuits processing auditory input, from lower (sensory) to higher (cognitive) areas, follow different temporal windows, sensitive to more and more abstract levels of linguistic information, from phonemes and words to sentences and discourse (Lerner et al. 2011; Stephens et al. 2013).”
Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing (2017, result): “These findings are congruent with previous indications that those areas may be more specifically involved in sentence or even discourse-level integration (39).”
Psychology, Meaning Making, and the Study of Worldviews: Beyond Religion and Non-Religion (2018, background): “temporo-parietal junction, which integrate multisensory information across medium-to-long spans of time (Tylen et al., 2015; Lerner et al., 2011).”
20 years of the default mode network: a review and synthesis (2023, background): “92,93 Neural activation patterns in the PCC tend to persist for extended periods of time during naturalistic movie watching, and transition points coincide with perceived event boundaries.”
Speech Rhythms and Multiplexed Oscillatory Sensory Coding in the Human Brain (2013, methodology): “Stimuli have been previously used in an fMRI study [66].”
Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings (2022, result): “Although previous studies have demonstrated that most parts of cortex are active during language processing 5,22–24 , it is unclear which regions represent language at the granularity of words and phrases 25 , which regions are consistently engaged in language processing 26 and whether different…”
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Phase Synchronization as a Measure of Dynamic Functional Connectivity (2012, positive): “These happen to be the sensory cortical areas with short visual (Hasson et al., 2008) and auditory (Lerner et al., 2011) temporal receptive windows.”