Neurons along the auditory core-belt pathway respond to progressively more complex sound features.

Evidence

Nonetheless, in this review, we focus on the hierarchical processing that occurs at different stages in the ventral auditory pathway. In particular, we identify—or, at least, suggest—the unique contributions of these different processing stages to auditory perception and categorization, with an acknowledgment that associating any single brain region with a particular computation oversimplifies the complexity of the auditory brain. Indeed, it is well known that neurons become increasingly sensitive to more complex stimuli along the beginning stages of the ventral auditory pathway (e.g., between the core and belt regions of the auditory cortex). For example, core neurons are more sharply tuned for tone bursts than neurons in the lateral belt, whereas lateral-belt neurons are more selective for particular spectrotemporal features of complex sounds, such as vocalizations (Rauschecker and Tian 2000 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4884

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instantiation of hierarchical sensory processing, paralleling the visual ventral stream’s progression from simple to complex feature selectivity.