FROM OBJECTIVE TO SUBJECTIVE - PITCH REPRESENTATION IN THE HUMAN AUDITORY-CORTEX

MAGNETIC brain responses to infrequent changes in the pitch of complex sounds were recorded. The composition of the test sounds required tha t pitch-deviant stimuli elicited the mismatch response only if perceiv ed pitch was represented in auditory sensory memory. Results revealed that subjective features, such as pitch, are formed from objective sti mulus parameters (i.e. the spectral contents of a sound) before storin g acoustic information in memory. The origin of the magnetic response to pitch change showed that pitch deviation was detected in the audito ry cortex. Pitch memory might also be located in the auditory cortex, as previous evidence suggests that storage for an auditory feature lie s in the vicinity of the neuronal elements activated by deviations in that feature.