Decoding Of The Auditory Information From Normal And Blind Person Based On Functional Connectivity

Hearing is one of the primary ways to percept the world,for the blind,hearing is more important to them.In the auditory information,the category information of the sound is an important part of it.Most of the current studies on sound categories were based on univariate analysis or multivariable decoding method based on activation,which reveal that some regions of the brain are sensitive to auditory category information.However,it is ambiguous whether the category information can be decoded by the whole brain functional connectivity.In this study,four familiar sounds were selected and the experimental paradigm was designed with block design.Firstly,task-state data were collected with the experimental paradigm,after preprocessing,the function connectivity pattern were constructed with healthy subjects and visually impaired subjects under four kinds of sound categories.Then,the functional connections are used as the features,and the auditory category information decoding is carried out with combination of the multi-variable pattern analysis.And a further analysis is conducted on the basis of the selected functional connections after the decoding process.Finally,the method of classical multi-voxel pattern analysis was used and compared with the method of this study.The results show that the decoding method based on the whole brain functional connection mode has achieved good performance: the multi-categories decoding got higher accuracy rate(80%)than the traditional method.At the same time,it was found that the accuracy of decoding of visual impairment subjects was higher than that of healthy subjects,and the difference between different groups was also reflected on the activation level.Based on the successful decoding of the functional connectivity,the discriminative functional networks were obtained through the analysis of the functional connectivity,and the significant ability of category discrimination is shown on the overlapping brain regions in the network,especially HG and STG.The voxel-based decoding method has verified that these regions have the ability to discriminate the auditory category information.This study shows that the functional connectivity can be used to represent the category information;the decoding method based on the functional connection can successfully decode the sound category information and is robust.In addition,the successful decoding of thismethod also suggests that there is an intrinsic interaction between these separated brain regions of the brain.