Figure 2.

The figure shows the auditory cortex’s activation in various conditions. The activity is greater when attention is directed toward the sound (active listening) in comparison with when it is directed away from the sound toward a visual task (1-back). When the difficulty of the visual task increases (3-back), the neural activity of the auditory cortex is further suppressed. As the n-back task involves sub-vocal rehearsal, and to preserve statistical power, the left hemisphere only is shown, but the result pattern was the same for right hemisphere. Error bars represent standard error of means. Activation (red) and deactivation (green) is rendered on the left hemisphere for the active listening vs. silence contrast and the 3-back vs. 1-back contrast. The contrasts displayed in the Figure resulted from four one-sample t-tests, testing for the effect of sound (active listening vs. silence, T = 5.39, FWE corrected p < 0.05, k = 0), working memory load (3-back > 1-back, T = 5.31, FWE corrected p < 0.05, k = 0), 3-back vs. silence (T = 5.30, FWE corrected p < 0.05, k = 0), and 1-back vs. silence (T = 5.40, FWE corrected p < 0.05, k = 0). The coordinates for the contrasts are shown in Table 4.