Behavioral semantics of learning and crossmodal processing in auditory cortex: The semantic processor concept

► This article attempts to reconcile two phenomena of auditory cortex, namely that early auditory cortex can show different types of learning-related changes of sound representation and that during learning even this early auditory cortex is under strong multimodal influence. ► We put forward the hypothesis that these two phenomena can be connected under the aspect of how task-specific meaning of sounds is derived by either detection, discrimination or categorization learning. ►This hypothesis is developed from the biological perspective of how behavioral meaning is usually attributed by individuals to novel environmental sounds, namely by multimodal exploration of sources and contexts. ► As argued in the article, the firing related to non-auditory events and modulations of auditory responses suggest that auditory cortex functions as a “semantic processor” rather than only an auditory pattern analyzer.