PMC

A typical screen shot (rendered in grayscale) of the space-invaders game; for a detailed description, see the study by . Subjects had to move their viewfinder toward the looming alien (here in white) and position it in the center of the screen so as to kill or capture it.

Schematic representations of the different sounds from the four auditory categories heard during the computer game training (taken from ). Each exemplar is comprised of the invariant lower spectral peak (a square wave) and one of six possible higher spectral peaks (either sawtooth or bandpass noise). Each of the four auditory categories was paired with a space-invader alien picture.

Overall differences in activation between pretraining and posttraining scans, painted in orange onto lateral (top) and medial (bottom) views of an average inflated cortical surface using FreeSurfer (). Here, sulci are dark gray, and gyri are light gray. Bar graphs represent β weights at the peak voxel for each activation cluster; error bars represent ± 1 SE.

Increased activation in speech-sensitive superior temporal sulcus with auditory expertise. a, The group-based speech > environmental sound localizer functional ROI, painted in transparent yellow onto the average inflated cortical surface. The location of increase in activation from pretraining to posttraining is painted in orange on the cortical surface. b, The relationship between subjects' performance at categorizing the sounds outside the scanner and change in β weights from pretraining to posttraining (averaged across the cluster). c, The relationship between auditory categorization ability and change in β weights from pretraining to posttraining, averaged across individually defined functional ROIs.