d an improved experimental design that enabled them to more sensitively determine the brains auditory spatial location center. For example, they presented their human subjects with sounds against a background of silence, used headphones that more accurately reproduced sound location, and used noise with a rich spectrum, which has been shown to be more readily locatable in space. They also used sounds recorded from microphones placed in each subjects own ears, and then played the same sounds back, thus tailoring the sounds specifically to the subjects own head and ears.
In their experiments, they presented bursts of the noise to the volunteers wearing the headphones while the subjects brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. In this widely used brain-scanning technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio waves are used to image blood flow in brain regions, which reflects brain activity in those locations.
The subjects were instructed to ignore the sounds. And, to divert their attention, they either watched a movie with the sound turned off or were given a simple button-pushing task.
When the position of the noise bursts was varied in space, the researchers found that the planum temporale in the subjects brain was, indeed, activated. Whats more, the greater the number of distinct sound locations subjects heard during test runs, the greater the activity in the planum temporale.
The researchers thus concluded that their experiments suggest that neurons in this region represent, in a nonintentional or preattentive fashion, the location of sound sources in the environment.
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