Separate neural subsystems support goal-directed speech listening
Liu-Fang Zhou,
Dan Zhao,
Xuan Cui,
Bingbing Guo,
Fangwei Zhu,
Chunliang Feng,
Jinhui Wang,
Ming Meng
Affiliations
Liu-Fang Zhou
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; Key Lab of BI-AI Collaborated Information Behavior, School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, 201620, China
Dan Zhao
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China
Xuan Cui
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China
Bingbing Guo
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China; School of Teacher Education, Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, Nanjing, 211171, China
Fangwei Zhu
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China
Chunliang Feng
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China
Jinhui Wang
Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; Center for Studies of Psychological Application, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, Institute for Brain Research and Rehabilitation, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China; Corresponding author.
Ming Meng
Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; Corresponding author.
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 and ContA_PFCl) always 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.
