Biology subjects

Ricciardi, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Ricciardi, E..

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Lack of vision shifts occipital dynamics toward a frontal-like regime and enhances top-down connectivity

The human occipital cortex is robustly repurposed for non-visual cognition after blindness, yet it remains unknown whether this functional reassignment is accompanied by a fundamental retuning of its intrinsic neural dynamics. Here, we recorded the electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of frontal and occipital areas to causally probe local cortical reactivity and large-scale effective connectivity in 16 blind individuals and 16 sighted controls. Direct perturbation of the occipital cortex revealed a profound shift in its intrinsic operating regime: compared with sighted participants, blind individuals exhibited faster, lower-amplitude TMS-evoked potentials that closely resembled the electrophysiological signature of the frontal cortex, which turned out to be comparable in the two populations. At the network level, source analyses further showed a specific enhancement of frontal-to-occipital effective connectivity, whereas occipital-to-frontal propagation remained unchanged. Importantly, among blind participants, faster occipital dynamics were associated with stronger frontal-driven occipital recruitment, directly linking local temporal retuning to enhanced top-down network influence. Together, these findings indicate that blindness reshapes both the intrinsic dynamics and large-scale integration of the occipital cortex. We propose that successful functional reassignment of the occipital cortex requires not only changes in cortical connectivity but also a tuning of the temporal operating regime toward a faster dynamics, enabling its embedding into distributed cognitive networks and providing a mechanistic framework for the functional reassignment of deafferented cortex.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Brain-wide distributed processing underlying natural vision and audition

A key challenge in neuroscience is understanding how large-scale brain dynamics give rise to perception under naturalistic conditions. Here we address this question using multivariate information decomposition of functional interactions between brain regions while typically developed, congenitally blind and congenitally deaf participants experienced audiovisual, auditory-only or visual-only versions of the same narrative. This approach allowed us to resolve information dynamics into redundant components, indexing shared information and sensory robustness, and synergistic components, indexing distributed processing that emerges only through joint interactions between brain regions. Redundant interactions were closely aligned with conventional functional connectivity and captured sensory modality- and experience-dependent differences mainly within sensory systems, whereas synergistic interactions captured these differences across high-level cortical areas. Crucially, prefrontal cortex coordinated brain dynamics through synergistic interactions independently of sensory modality and previous sensory experience, consistent with a modality-independent hub that encodes high-level semantic information and orchestrates the demands of naturalistic perception. Moreover, multimodal perception elicited the strongest high-order synergistic interactions across distributed brain subsystems, followed by unimodal visual and auditory perception, whereas sensory deprivation reduced this distributed architecture. Finally, synergistic and redundant interactions jointly supported the encoding of low-level sensory and high-level perceptual features, revealing how the trade-off between sensory robustness and distributed processing is organized across the human brain. Together, these results reveal a brain-wide information architecture for natural vision and audition, illuminating how distributed processing in the human brain supports rich perceptual experience.

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bioRxiv2025

Immersive NREM dreaming preserves subjective sleep depth against declining sleep pressure

Perceived sleep depth is a key determinant of subjective sleep quality, traditionally thought to reflect unconsciousness and reduced cortical activation. Here, we combined high-density EEG with a serial awakening paradigm during NREM sleep to examine its neural and experiential correlates. As expected, deeper sleep was associated with reduced cortical activation, reflected in a lower high-to-low frequency power ratio. Yet, this relationship weakened in the presence of dreaming, indicating that immersive conscious experiences can counteract the impact of cortical activation on perceived depth. Indeed, perceived sleep depth was lowest during states with a mere sense of presence and highest during immersive dreaming or deep unconsciousness. Across the night, physiological sleep pressure and subjective sleepiness declined, but perceived sleep depth rose alongside increasing dream immersiveness. These results challenge the view that deep sleep stems solely from reduced brain activity and suggest that immersive dreaming sustains perceived sleep depth as homeostatic pressure wanes.

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bioRxiv2025

Beyond Reorganization: Intrinsic cortical hierarchies constrain experience-dependent plasticity in sensory-deprived humans

Innate cortical organisation and postnatal sensory experience interact dynamically to shape the functional architecture of the human brain. Using naturalistic stimulation, functional gradient analyses, and comparative approaches in congenitally blind, congenitally deaf, and typically developed individuals, we investigated how intrinsic hierarchical structures and sensory experiences influence cortical organisation. Our findings demonstrate that the principal functional gradients spanning from unimodal sensory to transmodal association cortices are consistently preserved across all groups, suggesting a robust genetically determined cortical scaffold. Nonetheless, congenital sensory deprivation selectively reshapes the geometry of modality-specific gradients, characterised by reduced functional differentiation within sensory-deprived cortical regions. These geometric contractions promote experience-driven plastic reorganization, enabling deprived sensory areas to establish enhanced functional connectivity with transmodal and non-deprived sensory cortices. Critically, this reorganisation aligns systematically with pre-existing cortical gradients, highlighting intrinsic hierarchical constraints that guide experience-dependent plasticity. Moreover, sensory-deprived regions exhibiting heightened connectivity actively engage in processing structured perceptual information from intact modalities, reflecting specific feature-driven cross-modal adaptations. Collectively, these results underscore a fundamental duality in cortical organisation: innate hierarchical principles impose constraints on cortical architecture, while sensory experience drives adaptive refinement, demonstrating the brains intrinsic capacity for flexible functional reconfiguration in response to sensory deprivation.

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bioRxiv2025

Thalamic involvement defines distinct slow-wave subtypes in NREM sleep

Slow waves (0.5-4 Hz) are a key feature of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep, traditionally believed to arise from neocortical circuits. However, growing evidence suggests that subcortical structures, particularly the thalamus, may play a crucial role in initiating and synchronizing slow waves. We tested the hypothesis that single slow waves may arise from distinct cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical mechanisms using simultaneous EEG-fMRI in healthy adults. Spatial mapping based on thalamic fMRI responses revealed two types of slow waves. The first type (C1) characterized by an early thalamic fMRI-signal increase, corresponded to large, efficiently synchronized waves associated with sleep spindles and with markers of higher arousal and autonomic activation. The second type (C2) is marked by an initial negative fMRI response and corresponds to smaller slow waves potentially resulting from cortico-cortical synchronization. These waves occur more often during phases of stable NREM sleep. These findings highlight distinct slow-wave subtypes with different thalamic involvement and, potentially, synchronization mechanisms.

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bioRxiv2024

Resilience and vulnerability of speech neural tracking to early auditory deprivation

Infants are born with biological biases that favour language acquisition. One is the auditory systems ability to track the envelope of continuous speech, a pivotal feature for spoken language comprehension in adulthood. However, the extent to which neural speech tracking relies on postnatal auditory experience remains unknown. In this case-control study, we tested children with or without access to functional hearing in the first year of life after they received cochlear implants (CIs) for hearing restoration. We measured neural speech tracking in CI users with a congenital bilateral profound deafness (CD) or who acquired it later in development (AD; minimum auditory experience after birth 12 months), as well as in two groups of hearing controls listening to original (HC) or vocoded-speech (HC-v). Remarkably, neural speech tracking in children with CIs was unaffected by the absence of perinatal auditory experience. Regardless of deafness onset, CI users and HC exhibited a similar neural tracking magnitude at short timescales [~]50- 130 ms (P1TRF) of brain activity. However, this neural tracking phase (P1TRF) was delayed in CI users, and its timing depended on the age of hearing restoration. Conversely, at longer timescales [~]130-260 ms (N2TRF) of brain activity, speech tracking was substantially dampened in participants with CIs, thereby accounting for their comprehension deficits. Speech tracking in HC listening to vocoded-speech and in a phantom head-model with CIs suggested that neural processing differences between HC and CI children could not merely be explained by the degraded acoustic stimulation, nor by electrical artifacts of the implants. These findings highlight (i) the resilience of sensory components of neural speech tracking to the lack of hearing in the first year of life, (ii) the crucial role played when hearing restoration takes place in mitigating the impact of atypical auditory experience, (iii) the vulnerability of higher hierarchical levels of speech processing in CI users.

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bioRxiv2024

The impact of face masks on face-to-face neural tracking of speech: auditory and visual obstacles

Face masks provide fundamental protection against the transmission of respiratory viruses but hamper communication. We estimated auditory and visual obstacles generated by face masks on communication by measuring the neural tracking of face-to-face speech. To this end, we recorded the EEG while participants were exposed to naturalistic audio-visual speech, embedded in multi-talker noise, in three contexts: (i) no-mask (audio-visual information was fully available), (ii) virtual mask (occluded lips, but intact audio), and (iii) real mask (occluded lips and degraded audio). The neural tracking of lip movements and the sound envelope of speech was measured through backward modeling, that is, by reconstructing stimulus properties from neural activity. Behaviorally, face masks increased listening -phonological-errors in speech content retrieval and perceived listening difficulty. At the neural level, we observed that the occlusion of the mouth abolished lip tracking and dampened neural tracking of the speech envelope at the earliest processing stages. Degraded acoustic information due to face mask filtering altered neural tracking at later processing stages instead. Finally, a consistent link emerged between the increment of listening perceived difficulty and the drop in reconstruction performance of speech envelope when attending to a speaker wearing a face mask. Results clearly dissociated the visual and auditory impacts of face masks on face-to-face neural tracking of speech. While face masks hampered the ability to predict and integrate audio-visual speech, the auditory filter generated by face masks impacted the neural processing stages typically associated with auditory selective attention. The link between perceived difficulty and neural tracking drop provided evidence of a major impact of face masks on the metacognitive levels subtending speech processing.

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bioRxiv2024

Brain and grammar: revealing electrophysiological basic structures with competing statistical models

Acoustic, lexical and syntactic information is simultaneously processed in the brain. Therefore, distinguishing the electrophysiological activity pertaining to these components requires complex and indirect strategies. Capitalizing on previous works which factor out acoustic information, we could concentrate on the lexical and syntactic contribution to language processing by testing competing statistical models. We exploited EEG recordings and compared different surprisal models selectively involving lexical information, part of speech or syntactic structures in various combinations. EEG responses were recorded in 32 participants during listening to affirmative active declarative sentences and compared the activation corresponding to basic syntactic structures, such as noun phrases vs verb phrases. Lexical and syntactic processing activates different frequency bands, different time windows and different networks. Moreover, surprisal models based on part of speech inventory only do not explain well the electrophysiological data, while those including syntactic information do. Finally, we confirm previous measures obtained with intracortical recordings independently supporting the original hypothesis addressed here in a robust way.

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bioRxiv2023

Brain encoding of naturalistic, continuous, and unpredictable tactile events

AbstractStudies employing EEG to measure somatosensory responses have been typically optimized to compute event-related potentials in response to discrete events (ERPs). However, tactile interactions involve continuous processing of non-stationary inputs that change in location, duration, and intensity. To fill this gap, this study aims to demonstrate the possibility of measuring the neural tracking of continuous and unpredictable tactile information. Twenty-seven young adults (females = 15) were continuously and passively stimulated with a random series of gentle brushes on single fingers of each hand, which were covered from view. Thus, tactile stimulations were unique for each participant, and stimulated fingers. An encoding model measured the degree of synchronization between brain activity and continuous tactile input, generating a temporal response function (TRF). Brain topographies associated with the encoding of each finger stimulation showed a contralateral response at central sensors starting at 50 ms and peaking at about 140 ms of lag, followed by a bilateral response at about 240 ms. A series of analyses highlighted that reliable tactile TRF emerged after just 3 minutes of stimulation. Strikingly, topographical patterns of the TRF allowed discriminating digit lateralization across hands and digit representation within each hand. Our results demonstrated for the first time the possibility of using EEG to measure the neural tracking of a naturalistic, continuous, and unpredictable stimulation in the somatosensory domain. Crucially, this approach allows the study of brain activity following individualized, idiosyncratic tactile events to the fingers. Significant StatementThis study expands the current research conducted on neural tracking, opening the exploration of idiosyncratic tactile events and overcoming constraints of laboratory tasks that typically rely on discrete events. We validated a protocol for the ecological investigations of continuous, slow, tactile processing of the hands. The employed approach enriches the possible use of the EEG to characterize somatosensory neural representations of tactile events. Findings unravel coherent neural responses to continuous and naturalistic touch, with sensitivity for digit lateralization and representation.

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bioRxiv2023

Cognitive load dissonance and personality factors: an empirical analysis in organizational settings

Previous research that aimed at characterizing the importance of workers personological traits in coping with stress in organizational settings is often biased by the potential inconsistency (i.e., dissonance) between subjective perception and objective experience of workload. This study explored the relationship between the subjective, self-reported and objective physiological measures of cognitive load, and the possible confounding role of personality traits on a representative population (call center operators) in ecological settings (daily working routines consisting in inbound and outbound calls). With this aim, the personality traits of 30 call center operators were preliminarily characterized using the Ten Item Personality Inventory. Then, objective heart rate variability and electrodermal activity were measured during their inbound and outbound calls. Finally, a subjective self-evaluation of the experienced cognitive load was acquired. No significant correlations were found between subjective and objective measures of cognitive load except when controlling for personality traits. In particular, a negative correlation was found between the subjective perception of cognitive load and the psychophysiological indices of the parasympathetic tone. Specifically, the personality factors of Openness to Experience, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability have a significant influence on the subjective perception of cognitive load, without predicting the objective psychophysiological expression. Our study emphasizes the importance of studying the dissonance between subjectively-perceived feelings and their objective physiological instantiation, along with the influence of personality factors, in organizational settings.

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bioRxiv2023

Abstract, modality-specific and experience-dependent coding of affect in the human brain

Emotion and perception are tightly intertwined, as affective experiences often arise from the appraisal of sensory information. Nonetheless, whether the brain encodes emotional instances using a sensory-specific code or in a more abstract manner is unclear. Here, we answer this question by measuring the association between emotion ratings collected during a unisensory or multisensory presentation of a full-length movie and brain activity recorded in typically-developed, congenitally blind and congenitally deaf participants. Emotional instances are encoded in a vast network encompassing sensory, prefrontal, and temporal cortices. Within this network, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores a categorical representation of emotion independent of modality and experience, and the posterior superior temporal cortex maps valence using an abstract code. Sensory experience more than modality impacts how the brain organizes emotional information outside supramodal regions, suggesting the existence of a scaffold for the representation of emotional states where sensory inputs during development shape its functioning.

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bioRxiv2023

Hemispheric asymmetries in auditory cortex reflect discriminative responses to temporal details or summary statistics of stationary sounds.

The processing of stationary sounds relies on both local features and compact representations. As local information is compressed into summary statistics, abstract representations emerge. Whether the brain is endowed with distinct neural architectures overseeing such computations is unknown. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we employed a validated protocol to localize cortical correlates of local and summary representations, exposing participants to triplets of synthetic sound textures systematically varying for either local details or summary statistics. Sounds also varied for their sound duration, specifically short (40ms) or long (478ms). Results revealed clear distinct activation patterns for local features and summary statistics changes. Such activations diverged in magnitude, spatiotemporal distribution, and hemispheric lateralization. For short sounds, a change in local features, compared to summary statistics, predominantly activated the right hemisphere. Conversely, for long sounds, a change in summary statistics elicited higher activation than a change in local features in both hemispheres. Specifically, while the right auditory cortex was responding more to changes in local features or summary statistics depending on sound duration (short or long, respectively), the left frontal lobe was selectively engaged in processing a change in summary statistics at a long sound duration. These findings provide insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the computation of local and summary acoustic information and highlight the involvement of distinct cortical pathways and hemispheric lateralization in auditory processing at different temporal resolutions. Significant StatementWe revealed hemispheric specializations for auditory computations at high (local) and low (summary statistics) temporal resolutions. The right hemisphere was engaged for both computations, while the left hemisphere responded more to summary statistics changes. These findings highlight the multifaceted functions of the right hemisphere in capturing acoustic properties of stationary sounds and the left hemispheres involvement in processing abstract representations.

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bioRxiv2023

Maturation-dependent changes in cortical and thalamic activity during slow waves of light sleep: insights from a combined EEG-fMRI study

INTRODUCTIONStudies using scalp EEG have shown that slow waves (0.5-4 Hz), the most prominent hallmark of NREM sleep, undergo relevant changes from childhood to adulthood, mirroring brain structural modifications and the acquisition of cognitive skills. Here we used simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate the cortical and subcortical correlates of slow waves in school-age children and determine their relative developmental changes. METHODSWe analyzed data from 14 school-age children with self-limited focal epilepsy of childhood who fell asleep during EEG-fMRI recordings. Brain regions associated with slow-wave occurrence were identified using a voxel-wise regression that also modeled interictal epileptic discharges and sleep spindles. At the group level, a mixed-effects linear model was used. The results were qualitatively compared with those obtained from 2 adolescents with epilepsy and 17 healthy adults. RESULTSSlow waves were associated with hemodynamic-signal decreases in bilateral somatomotor areas. Such changes extended more posteriorly relative to those in adults. Moreover, the involvement of areas belonging to the default mode network changes as a function of age. No significant hemodynamic responses were observed in subcortical structures. However, we identified a significant correlation between age and thalamic hemodynamic changes. CONCLUSIONSPresent findings indicate that the somatomotor cortex may have a key role in slow-wave expression throughout the lifespan. At the same time, they are consistent with a posterior-to-anterior shift in slow-wave distribution mirroring brain maturational changes. Finally, our results suggest that slow-wave changes may not reflect only neocortical modifications but also the maturation of subcortical structures, including the thalamus. Statement of significanceLow spatial resolution of conventional EEG has widely limited the possibility of accurately determining in humans the role of different brain structures in the expression of sleep slow waves throughout development. Here, for the first time, we took advantage of a simultaneous EEG-fMRI approach to accurately describe the cortical and subcortical hemodynamic correlates of sleep slow waves in a sample of 14 school-aged children. In order to elucidate age-dependent changes, we qualitatively compared present findings with those previously obtained in a group of adults. Overall our results have important implications for the understanding of how cortico-cortical and subcortico-cortical interactions shape sleep slow waves across development.

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bioRxiv2023

An intact oculomotor neural circuit in congenital blindness

In the past three decades, multiple studies revealed that congenital blindness is associated with functional and structural reorganization in early visual areas and its interaction with other neural systems. Among the most reproducible findings is the weaker connectivity between the visual and sensorimotor cortices, which in sighted individuals plays a role in eye-motor coordination. Here we demonstrate an important exception to this reorganization phenomena: we find that in congenitally blind individuals (as for normally sighted ones), spontaneous, non-controlled eye movements correlate with connectivity between visual and sensorimotor cortices. Furthermore, using time-lagged regression, we show that eye movements drive activity in the visual cortex, which subsequently drives sensorimotor activity. Remarkably, this phenomenon persists even though blind participants often exhibit unsynchronized eye movements and cannot sense or regulate their eye positions. These findings provide evidence of a preserved, "non-functional" connectivity in congenitally blind individuals and reveal a firm, hard-wired constraint on connectivity that remains immune to any reorganization phenomena produced by lack of visual experience and oculomotor control.

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bioRxiv2022

Early visual cortex tracks speech envelope in the absence of visual input

Neural entrainment to continuous speech is typically observed within the language network and can be modulated by both low-level acoustic features and high-level meaningful linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, phrases, and sentences). Recent evidence showed that visual cortex may entrain to speech envelope, however its putative role in the hierarchy of speech processing remains unknown. We tested blindfolded participants who listened to semantically meaningful or meaningless stories, either in quiet or embedded in multi-talker babble noise. Entrainment to speech was assessed with forward linear modeling of participants EEG activity. We investigated (1) low-level acoustic effects by contrasting neural tracking of speech presented in quiet or noise and (2) high-level linguistic effects by contrasting neural tracking to meaningful or meaningless stories. Results showed that envelope tracking was enhanced and delayed for speech embedded in noise compared to quiet. When semantic information was missing, entrainment to speech envelope was fastened and reduced. Source modeling revealed that envelope tracking engaged wide neural networks beyond the auditory cortex, including early visual cortex. Surprisingly, while no clear influence of semantic content was found, the magnitude of visual cortex entrainment was affected by low-level features. The decrease of sound SNR-level dampened visual cortex tracking, suggesting an active suppressing mechanism in challenging listening conditions. Altogether, these findings provide further evidence of a functional role of early visual cortex in the entrainment to continuous speech.

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bioRxiv2022

Short-term monocular deprivation boosts neural responsiveness to audio-visual events for the undeprived eye

A brief period of monocular deprivation (MD) induces short-term plasticity of the adult visual system. Whether MD elicits changes beyond visual processing is yet unclear. Here, we assessed the specific impact of MD on multisensory processes. Neural oscillations associated with visual and audio-visual processing were measured for both the deprived and the undeprived eye. Results revealed that MD changed neural activities associated with unimodal and multisensory processes in an eye-specific manner. Selectively for the deprived eye, alpha activity was reduced within the first 150 ms of visual processing. Conversely, gamma activity was enhanced in response to audio-visual events only for the undeprived eye within 100-300 ms after stimulus onset. The analysis of gamma responses to unimodal auditory events revealed that MD elicited a crossmodal upweighting for the undeprived eye. Distributed source modeling suggested that the right parietal cortex played a major role in all neural effects induced by MD. Finally, visual and audio-visual processing alterations emerged selectively for the induced (but not the evoked) component of the neural oscillations, indicating a major role of feedback connectivity. These findings support a model in which MD increases excitability to visual events for the deprived eye and to audio-visual and auditory events for the undeprived eye. On the one hand, these results reveal the causal impact of MD on both unisensory and multisensory processes but with distinct frequency-specific profiles. On the other hand, they highlight the feedback nature of short-term neural plasticity. Overall this study shed light on the high flexibility and interdependence of unimodal and multisensory functions. Highlights- We unveiled the impact of temporary MD on visual and audio-visual processing - MD enhanced visual excitability for the deprived eye - MD boosted neural responses to audio-visual events for the undeprived eye - Analyses of auditory processing revealed crossmodal effects following MD - Short-term MD primarily affects induced, non-phase-locked, oscillatory activity

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bioRxiv2022

A visual representation of the hand in the resting somatomotor regions of the human brain

Hands are regularly in sight in everyday life. This visibility affects motor control, perception, and attention, as visual information is integrated into an internal model of sensorimotor control. Spontaneous brain activity, i.e., ongoing activity in the absence of an active task (rest), is correlated among somatomotor regions that are jointly activated during motor tasks1. Moreover, recent studies suggest that spontaneous activity patterns do not only replay at rest task activation patterns, but also maintain a model of the statistical regularities (priors) of the body and environment, which may be used to predict upcoming behavior2-4. Here we test whether spontaneous activity in the human somatomotor cortex is modulated by visual stimuli that display hands vs. non-hand stimuli, and by the use/action they represent. We analyzed activity with fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis to examine the similarity between spontaneous (rest) activity patterns and task-evoked patterns to the presentation of natural hands, robot hands, gloves, or control stimuli (food). In the left somatomotor cortex we observed a stronger (multi-voxel) spatial correlation between resting-state activity and natural hand picture patterns, as compared to other stimuli. A trend analysis showed that task-rest pattern similarity was influenced by inferred visual and motor attributes (i.e., correlation for hand>robot>glove>food). We did not observe any task-rest similarity in the visual cortex. We conclude that somatomotor brain regions code at rest for visual representations of hand stimuli and their inferred use.

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bioRxiv2022

Distinct cortical responses to Auditory Statistics: pre-attentive discriminations based on local and global representations

The auditory system relies on both local and summary representations; acoustic local features exceeding system constraints are compacted into a set of summary statistics. Such compression is pivotal for sound-object recognition. Here, we assessed whether computations subtending local and statistical representations of sounds could be distinguished at the neural level. A computational auditory model was employed to extract auditory statistics from natural sound textures (i.e., fire, rain) and to generate synthetic exemplars where local and statistical properties were controlled. Twenty-four human participants were passively exposed to auditory streams while the EEG was recorded. Each stream could consist of short, medium, or long sounds to vary the amount of acoustic information. Short and long sounds were expected to engage local or summary statistics representations, respectively. Data revealed a clear dissociation. Compared to summary-based ones, auditory-evoked responses based on local information were selectively greater in magnitude in short sounds. Opposite patterns emerged for longer sounds. Neural oscillations revealed that local features and summary statistics rely on neural activity occurring at different temporal scales, faster (beta) or slower (theta-alpha). These dissociations emerged automatically without explicit engagement in a discrimination task. Overall, this study demonstrates that the auditory system developed distinct coding mechanisms to discriminate changes in the acoustic environment based on fine structure and summary representations. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTPrior to this study, it was unknown whether we could measure auditory discrimination based on local temporal features or spectrotemporal statistics properties of sounds from brain responses. Results show that the two auditory modes of sound discrimination (local and summary statistics) are automatically attuned to the temporal resolution (high or low) at which a change has occurred. In line with the temporal resolutions of auditory statistics, faster or slower neural oscillations (temporal scales) code sound changes based on local or summary representations. These findings expand our knowledge of some fundamental mechanisms underlying the function of the auditory system.

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