Unilateral auditory cortex lesions impair or improve discrimination learning of amplitude modulated sounds, depending on lesion side.

Abstract

A fundamental principle of brain organization is bilateral symmetry of structures and functions. For spatial sensory and motor information processing, this organization is generally plausible subserving orientation and coordination of a bilaterally symmetric body. However, breaking of the symmetry principle is often seen for functions that depend on convergent information processing and lateralized output control, e.g. left hemispheric dominance for the linguistic speech system. Conversely, a subtle splitting of functions into hemispheres may occur if peripheral information from symmetric sense organs is partly redundant, e.g. auditory pattern recognition, and therefore allows central conceptualizations of complex stimuli from different feature viewpoints, as demonstrated e.g. for hemispheric analysis of frequency modulations in auditory cortex (AC) of mammals including humans. Here we demonstrate that discrimination learning of rapidly but not of slowly amplitude modulated tones is non-uniformly distributed across both hemispheres: While unilateral ablation of left AC in gerbils leads to impairment of normal discrimination learning of rapid amplitude modulations, right side ablations lead to improvement over normal learning. These results point to a rivalry interaction between both ACs in the intact brain where the right side competes with and weakens learning capability maximally attainable by the dominant left side alone.