Neural Correlates of Audiovisual Speech Perception in Aphasia and Healthy Aging
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The Texas Medical Center Library DigitalCommons@TMC The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses Center UTHealth Graduate School of (Open Access) Biomedical Sciences 12-2013 NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING Sarah H. Baum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/utgsbs_dissertations Part of the Behavioral Neurobiology Commons, Medicine and Health Sciences Commons, and the Systems Neuroscience Commons Recommended Citation Baum, Sarah H., "NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING" (2013). The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses (Open Access). 420. https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/utgsbs_dissertations/420 This Dissertation (PhD) is brought to you for free and open access by the The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at DigitalCommons@TMC. It has been accepted for inclusion in The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Dissertations and Theses (Open Access) by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@TMC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING by Sarah Haller Baum, B.S. APPROVED: ______________________________ Michael Beauchamp, Ph.D. Supervisory Professor ______________________________ Ruth Heidelberger, M.D., Ph.D. ______________________________ Harel Shouval, Ph.D. ______________________________ Michael Beierlein, Ph.D. ______________________________ Kartik Venkatachalam, Ph.D. APPROVED: ______________________________ Dean, The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Sarah Haller Baum, B.S., Houston, Texas December, 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks go to my advisor, Michael Beauchamp, for allowing me enough independence to encounter my own successes and failures while still giving me enough feedback to continually move forward in my research. To my labmates, thank you for all the helpful, supportive, and funny conversations, and for obliging me in an unknown number of coffee runs. To the faculty of my advisory, examining, and supervisory committees, thank you for taking the time to provide thoughtful feedback and critiques of my experiments. Thank you to Ruth Heidelberger and Harel Shouval for serving on every single committee from the very beginning. I would like to thank the Gulf Coast Consortia for the Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Fellowship, which provided financial support and a number of resources for professional development. The Neuroscience Program has been a great source of camaraderie and moral support throughout my time here. Many thanks especially to Heather Turner for sharing in my joy on the best days and providing support on the rough days, and to Audrey Nath, who continues to be a great friend and mentor. Lastly, I would never be here without my parents, who knew what I was capable of before I did and never let me settle for anything less. And to my siblings, Aron, Emma, and Hannah, who despite being younger than me are the most fiercely protective and supportive people I know. Thank you for letting me spend time halfway across the country to go follow my dream. iii NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH PERCEPTION IN APHASIA AND HEALTHY AGING Sarah Haller Baum, B.S. Supervisory Professor: Michael Beauchamp, Ph.D. Understanding speech in face-to-face conversation utilizes the integration of multiple pieces of information, most importantly the auditory vocal sounds and visual lip movements. Prior studies of the neural underpinnings of audiovisual integration in the brain have provided converging evidence to suggest that neurons within the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) provide a critical neural hub for the integration of auditory and visual information in speech. While most studies of audiovisual processing focus on neural mechanisms within healthy, young adults, we currently know very little about how changes to the brain can affect audiovisual integration in speech. To examine this further, two particular cases of changing neural structure were investigated. I first conducted a case study with patient SJ, who suffered damage from a stroke that injured a large portion of her left tempo-parietal area, including the left STS. I tested SJ five years after her stroke with behavioral testing and determined that she is able to integrate auditory and visual information in speech. In order to understand the neural basis of SJ’s intact multisensory integration abilities, I examined her and 23 age-matched controls with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). SJ had a greater volume of multisensory cortex as well as greater response amplitude in her right STS in response to an audiovisual speech illusion than the iv age-matched controls. This evidence suggests that SJ’s brain reorganized after her stroke such that the right STS now supports the functions of the stroke damaged left-sided cortex. Because changes to the brain occur even with healthy aging, I next examined the neural response to audiovisual speech in healthy older adults. Many behavioral studies have noted that older adults show not only performance declines during various sensory and cognitive tasks, but also greater variability in performance. I sought to determine if there is a neural counterpart to this increased behavioral variability. I found that older adults exhibited greater intrasubject variability in their neural responses across trials compared to younger adults. This was true in individual regions-of-interest in the multisensory speech perception network and across all brain voxels that responded to speech stimuli. This increase in variability may underlie a decreased ability of the brain to distinguish between similar stimuli (such as the categorical boundaries of speech perception), which could link these findings to declines in speech perception in aging. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ....................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................. vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: MULTISENSORY SPEECH PERCEPTION WITHOUT THE LEFT SUPERIOR TEMPORAL SULCUS .................................................................... 11 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 12 Methods .......................................................................................................... 13 Results ............................................................................................................ 20 Conclusions .................................................................................................... 33 CHAPTER 3: INCREASED NEURAL VARIABILITY IN MULTISENSORY SPEECH PERCEPTION IN OLDER ADULTS ................................................... 36 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 37 Methods .......................................................................................................... 39 Results ............................................................................................................ 50 Conclusions .................................................................................................... 64 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS ........................... 70 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 77 VITA ................................................................................................................... 94 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Types of speech stimuli. ...................................................................... 3 Figure 1.2 Structural MRI of a healthy young adult subject. ................................. 4 Figure 2.1 Anatomical MRI of SJ ........................................................................ 14 Figure 2.2 Stimuli used in experiments. .............................................................. 15 Figure 2.3 Behavioral testing results ................................................................... 23 Figure 2.4 fMRI activation during localizer scan ................................................. 25 Figure 2.5 Multisensory responses in the STS in SJ and controls ...................... 28 Figure 2.6 Hemodynamic response to all audiovisual stimuli ............................. 32 Figure 3.1 BOLD responses