Auditory ventral-pathway processing is hierarchical, with decisions arising only in frontal cortex.

Evidence

In summary, we propose a model in which auditory information is hierarchically organized and processed in the ventral pathway. In early parts of the auditory cortex, neural activity encodes the acoustic features of an auditory stimulus and become increasingly sensitive to complex spectrotemporal properties (Rauschecker and Tian 2000 ). In later regions of the auditory cortex, this information informs perceptual judgments. However, neural activity that reflects a listener’s perceptual judgments does not become apparent until the frontal lobe. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4892

Categorization

• DEFINE: Condenses the chapter’s central model: feature encoding early, judgment-related activity only later in frontal lobe.
• XREF: Fits the broader cortical hierarchy/decision literature (e.g., Heekeren et al. on decision-making in prefrontal vs. sensory regions).