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Mapping the spatiotemporal dynamics of processing task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant sound feature changes using concurrent EEG‐fMRI

The cortical processing of changes in auditory input involves auditory sensory regions as well as different frontoparietal brain networks. The spatiotemporal dynamics of the activation spread across these networks has, however, not been investigated in detail so far. We here approached this issue using concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), providing us with simultaneous information on both the spatial and temporal patterns of change‐related activity. We applied an auditory stimulus categorization task with switching categorization rules, allowing to analyze change‐related responses as a function of the changing sound feature (pitch or duration) and the task relevance of the change. Our data show the successive progression of change‐related activity from regions involved in early change detection to the ventral and dorsal attention networks, and finally the central executive network. While early change detection was found to recruit feature‐specific networks involving auditory sensory but also frontal and parietal brain regions, the later spread of activity across the frontoparietal attention and executive networks was largely independent of the changing sound feature, suggesting the existence of a general feature‐independent processing pathway of change‐related information. Task relevance did not modulate early auditory sensory processing, but was mainly found to affect processing in frontal brain regions. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3400–3416, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.