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Speaking precisely is important for effective verbal communication, and articulatory gain is one component of speech motor control that contributes to achieving this goal. Given that the basal ganglia have been proposed to regulate the speed and size of limb movement, that is, movement gain, we explored the basal ganglia contribution to articulatory gain, through local field potentials (LFP) recorded simultaneously from the subthalamic nucleus (STN), precentral gyrus, and postcentral gyrus. During STN deep brain stimulation implantation for Parkinson's disease, participants read aloud consonant-vowel-consonant syllables. Articulatory gain was indirectly assessed using the F2 Ratio, an acoustic measurement of the second formant frequency of/i/vowels divided by/u/vowels. Mixed effects models demonstrated that the F2 Ratio correlated with alpha and theta activity in the precentral gyrus and STN. No correlations were observed for the postcentral gyrus. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that higher phase locking values for beta activity between the STN and precentral gyrus were correlated with lower F2 Ratios, suggesting that higher beta synchrony impairs articulatory precision. Effects were not related to disease severity. These data suggest that articulatory gain is encoded within the basal ganglia-cortical loop., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Human speech perception rapidly adapts to maintain comprehension under adverse listening conditions. For example, with exposure listeners can adapt to heavily accented speech produced by a non-native speaker. Outside the domain of speech perception, adaptive changes in sensory and motor processing have been attributed to cerebellar functions. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigates whether adaptation in speech perception also involves the cerebellum. Acoustic stimuli were distorted using a vocoding plus spectral-shift manipulation and presented in a word recognition task. Regions in the cerebellum that showed differences before versus after adaptation were identified, and the relationship between activity during adaptation and subsequent behavioral improvements was examined. These analyses implicated the right Crus I region of the cerebellum in adaptive changes in speech perception. A functional correlation analysis with the right Crus I as a seed region probed for cerebral cortical regions with covarying hemodynamic responses during the adaptation period. The results provided evidence of a functional network between the cerebellum and language-related regions in the temporal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex. Consistent with known cerebellar contributions to sensorimotor adaptation, cerebro-cerebellar interactions may support supervised learning mechanisms that rely on sensory prediction error signals in speech perception., (© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Motivation is a complex process that leads to completion or avoidance of a behavior. Past research strongly implicates the basal ganglia in a circuit integral for the control of motivation. Specifically, the human striatum has been shown to process reward information, differentiating between monetary rewards and punishments in recent neuroimaging experiments. It is unclear, however, how the dorsal striatum, particularly the caudate nucleus, responds to changes in the motivational context of a task. Using an event-related design, where participants were given positive and negative feedback upon guessing the value of an unknown card, we manipulated the motivational context of the task by dividing trials into periods of high incentive (where visual feedback indicated monetary rewards and punishments) and low incentive (where visual feedback indicated only accuracy). We found that activity in the caudate nucleus was strongly influenced by the different incentive periods. The hemodynamic response was characterized by a larger rise at the onset of trials and larger differences between positive and negative feedback during periods of high incentive. These results suggest that changes in motivation are capable of modulating basal ganglia activity, and further support an important role for the caudate nucleus in affective processing.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the neural substrates of component processes in verbal working memory. Based on behavioral research using manipulations of verbal stimulus type to dissociate storage, rehearsal, and executive components of verbal working memory, we designed a delayed serial recall task requiring subjects to encode, maintain, and overtly recall sets of verbal items for which phonological similarity, articulatory length, and lexical status were manipulated. By using a task with temporally extended trials, we were able to exploit the temporal resolution afforded by fMRI to partially isolate neural contributions to encoding, maintenance, and retrieval stages of task performance. Several regions commonly associated with maintenance, including supplementary motor, premotor, and inferior frontal areas, were found to be active across all three trial stages. Additionally, we found that left inferior frontal and supplementary motor regions showed patterns of stimulus and temporal sensitivity implicating them in distinct aspects of articulatory rehearsal, while no regions showed a pattern of sensitivity consistent with a role in phonological storage. Regional modulation by task difficulty was further investigated as a measure of executive processing. We interpret our findings as they relate to notions about the cognitive architecture underlying verbal working memory performance.

Data from nine previous studies of human visual information processing using positron emission tomography were reanalyzed to contrast blood flow responses during passive viewing and active discriminations of the same stimulus array. The analysis examined whether active visual processing (i) increases blood flow in medial visual regions early in the visual hierarchy and (ii) decreases blood flow in auditory and somatosensory cortex. Significant modulation of medial visual regions was observed in six of nine studies, indicating that top-down processes can affect early visual cortex. Modulations showed several task dependencies, suggesting that in some cases the underlying mechanism was selective (e.g. analysis-or feature-specific) rather than non-selective. Replicable decreases at or near auditory Brodmann area (BA) left 41/42 were observed in two of five studies, but in different locations. Analyses that combined data across studies yielded modest but significant decreases. Replicable decreases were not found in primary somatosensory cortex but were observed in an insular region that may be a somatosensory association area. Decreases were also noted in the parietal operculum (perhaps SII) and BA 40. These results are inconsistent with a model in which the precortical input to task-irrelevant sensory cortical areas is broadly suppressed.

Previous studies using positron emission tomography (PET) report blood flow changes in superior and middle temple gyri associated with auditory and language tasks (Petersen et al., 1988, 1989; Wise et al., 1991; Demonet et al., 1992; Howard et al., 1992; Sergent et al., 1992; Zatorre et al., 1992; Petrides et al., 1993; Raichle et al., 1994; Fiez et al., 1995). An important issue is whether these changes reflect the activation of a single functional region or multiple regions with distinct functional contributions. In the present study, we examined this issue by focusing upon two tasks for which we have previously reported posterior temporal blood flow changes: listening to auditorily presented words (Petersen et al., 1988, 1989), and generation of a verb in response to a visually presented noun (Raichle et al., 1994); see also Wise et al. (1991). We began by further characterizing a left temporoparietal region of change previously associated with auditory word presentation. This previously reported response was replicated, and the results were extended by demonstrating presentation of pseudowords also produced activation. We next asked whether the activation associated with auditory word presentation could be distinguished from that associated with the generation of verbs in response to visually presented nouns. It was found that the activations associated with these two tasks could be both functionally and spatially dissociated. Thus, two posterior temporal areas associated with auditory word presentation and verb generation appear to represent distinct areas concerned with word processing. More generally, the results demonstrate an approach for assessing the independence of two activated areas.

Practice of a novel task leads to improved performance. The brain mechanisms associated with practice-induced improvement in performance are largely unknown. To address this question we have examined the functional anatomy of the human brain with positron emission tomography (PET) during the naive and practiced performance of a simple verbal response selection task (saying an appropriate verb for a visually presented noun). As a control state, subjects were asked to repeat the visually presented nouns. Areas of the brain most active during naive performance (anterior cingulate, left prefrontal and left posterior temporal cortices, and the right cerebellar hemisphere), compared to repeating the visually presented nouns, were all significantly less active during practiced performance. These changes were accompanied by changes in the opposite direction in sylvian-insular cortex bilaterally and left medial extrastriate cortex. In effect, brief practice made the cortical circuitry used for verbal response selection indistinguishable from simple word repetition. Introduction of a novel list of words reversed the learning-related effects. These results indicate that two distinct circuits can be used for verbal response selection and normal subjects can change the brain circuits used during task performance following less than 15 min of practice. One critical factor in determining the circuitry used appears to be the degree to which a task is learned or automatic.