APA
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Rupp, K., Hect, J. L., Harford, E., Holt, L. L., Ghuman, A., & Abel, T. J. (2025). A hierarchy of processing complexity and timescales for natural sounds in the human auditory cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Chicago/Turabian
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Rupp, K., Jasmine L. Hect, E. Harford, Lori L. Holt, A. Ghuman, and Taylor J. Abel. “A Hierarchy of Processing Complexity and Timescales for Natural Sounds in the Human Auditory Cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2025).
MLA
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Rupp, K., et al. “A Hierarchy of Processing Complexity and Timescales for Natural Sounds in the Human Auditory Cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{k2025a,
title = {A hierarchy of processing complexity and timescales for natural sounds in the human auditory cortex},
year = {2025},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
author = {Rupp, K. and Hect, Jasmine L. and Harford, E. and Holt, Lori L. and Ghuman, A. and Abel, Taylor J.}
}
Significance We compared human brain recordings during natural sound listening to representations within an artificial (deep) neural network (DNN) designed to categorize sounds. Despite not being exposed to real neural data during training, the DNN’s representations closely resembled auditory cortex responses. We found that the complexity of a cortical site’s representation (i.e., its best-matching DNN layer) increased across the auditory hierarchy and varied smoothly within regions, even those traditionally thought to represent uniform information types (e.g., primary auditory cortex). Finally, cortical sites with more complex representations required longer from sound onset to begin representing those features, even within regions of the auditory hierarchy, suggesting that both region and temporal dynamics are independently related to the complexity of a site’s representation.