Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Год журнала: 2025, Номер 122(14)

Опубликована: Апрель 1, 2025

We often exert greater cognitive resources (i.e., listening effort) to understand speech under challenging acoustic conditions. This mechanism can be overwhelmed in those with hearing loss, resulting fatigue adults and potentially impeding language acquisition children. However, the neural mechanisms that support effort are uncertain. Evidence from human studies suggests cingulate cortex is engaged difficult conditions may top–down modulation of auditory (AC). Here, we asked whether gerbil (Cg) sends anatomical projections AC facilitate perceptual performance. To model conditions, used a sound discrimination task which stimulus parameters were presented either “Easy” or “Hard” blocks long short duration, respectively). Gerbils achieved statistically identical psychometric performance Easy Hard blocks. Anatomical tracing experiments revealed strong, descending projection layer 2/3 Cg1 subregion superficial deep layers primary dorsal AC. determine Cg improves bilaterally infused muscimol inactivate found thresholds degraded for only test Cg-to-AC facilitates performance, chemogenetically inactivated these inputs was during Taken together, results reveal cortical pathway

Язык: Английский