Naturalistic Audiovisual Stimulation Reveals the Topographic Organization of Human Auditory Cortex

Despite the importance of audition in spatial, semantic, and social function, there is no consensus regarding the detailed organisation of human auditory cortex. Using a novel computational model to analyse a high-powered naturalistic audiovisual movie-watching dataset, we simultaneously estimate spectral tuning properties and category selectivity to reveal the modes of organisation and computational motifs that characterise human auditory cortex. We find that regions more remote from the auditory core exhibit more compressive, non-linear response properties and finely-tuned, speech-selective receptive fields in low frequency portions of the tonotopic map. These patterns of organisation mirror aspects of the visual cortical hierarchy, wherein tuning properties progress from a stimulus category-agnostic front end towards more advanced regions increasingly optimised for behaviorally relevant stimulus categories.