Adaptation to speaker's voice in right anterior temporal lobe

Little is known on how voices are represented in the brain. We used fMRI to investigate whether parts of auditory cortex would be sensitive to the repetition of a speaker's voice. Subjects were scanned while passively listening to spoken syllables, presented in blocs in which either syllable or speaker were repeated. Only one cortical region, located in the anterior part of the right superior temporal sulcus (STS), responded differently to the two conditions: activation relative to the silent baseline was significantly reduced when syllables were spoken by a single voice than when they were spoken by different voices. This result suggest that the right anterior STS plays an important role in the representation of individual voices.