Liping Wangcorrespondenceemail, Lynn Uhrig, Bechir Jarraya, Stanislas Dehaenecorrespondenceemail
Publication stage: In Press Corrected Proof
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.06.035
Macaque monkey brain
Source/Fonte: UCL/Grant Museum/SPL
Highlights
•The monkey brain is capable of representing numerical and sequence patterns
•fMRI responses to number and to sequence are segregated in the monkey
•The human inferior frontal gyrus responds to both types of patterns
•Humans and monkeys differ even in a simple sequence learning paradigm
Summary
The ability to extract deep structures from auditory sequences is a fundamental prerequisite of language acquisition. Using fMRI in untrained macaques and humans, we investigated the brain areas involved in representing two abstract properties of a series of tones: total number of items and tone-repetition pattern. Both species represented the number of tones in intraparietal and dorsal premotor areas and the tone-repetition pattern in ventral prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. However, we observed a joint sensitivity to both parameters only in humans, within bilateral inferior frontal and superior temporal regions. In the left hemisphere, those sites coincided with areas involved in language processing. Thus, while some abstract properties of auditory sequences are available to non-human primates, a recently evolved circuit may endow humans with a unique ability for representing linguistic and non-linguistic sequences in a unified manner.
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