Auditory temporal-order judgement is impaired in patients with cortical lesions in posterior regions of the left hemisphere

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Abstract

Auditory temporal-order judgement was investigated in patients suffering from unilateral focal brain lesions, localized in anterior or posterior regions of the left hemisphere (LH) (resulting in non-fluent or fluent aphasia, respectively), or in predominantly subcortical regions of this hemisphere (without aphasic syndromes) and in anterior or posterior regions of the right hemisphere. The temporal order threshold was measured as the minimum time interval between two clicks presented consecutively and binaurally via headphones (one to each ear) that was necessary for a subject to indicate the temporal order of the two stimuli. Only the patient group with fluent aphasia showed a significantly increased mean temporal-order threshold as compared to the controls. Our results indicate that fine temporal resolution for auditory stimuli is predominantly associated with posterior regions of the LH.

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Acknowledgements

These results are part of a study supported by the ’Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie‘, BMBF, FKZ 01KO 94026, and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. We thank Florian Kagerer and Matthias Reiser for data acquisition. We wish to thank Mario Prosiegel and Wolfgang Fries for CT and MRI evaluation. Especially, we appreciate helpful discussions with Ernst Pöppel.

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