Hans Menning 
Plasticity in auditory cortex on the grounds of learning discrimination 

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2002 in the subject Psychology – Biological Psychology, grade: magna cum laude, University of Münster (Institute for Experimental Audiology), language: English, abstract: The motivation for this thesis came from the intriguing idea that we continuously restructure our brain through everyday learning. How can this highly complex, highly adaptive “learning device” change and reorganize itself all the time while keeping the illusion that we are constantly “ourselves”? The question is, whether learning has the power to trigger functional and structural changes in the brain. Several levels of thinking are involved in an interdisciplinary way. Thus, on a psychological level, 3 major topics enter this work: learning, memory and preconscious or pre-attentive perception and processing of information. Pre-attentive perception means that the subjects’ attention and awareness is not mirrored in the neuronal response at a great deal. Learning is involved in this study as an improving discrimination of fine frequency and word duration differences; the latter was examined in a group of native and non-native speakers. Memory is referred to as sensory memory, a short-time memory trace that is established through the repetition of the same “standard” stimulus. In the auditory modality this has been termed “echoic memory”. A long, repetitive training engraves deep “traces” into the memory. The lifelong training of one’s native language results in a very fast and highly automated long-term memory access. On a neurophysiological level the main topics are plasticity and the reorganization of the underlying representational brain areas. Plastic changes on a molecular, synaptic and neuronal level and reorganization of cortical “maps” have been demonstrated abundantly in animal studies. On a physical level the measured magnetic fields and the calculation of the source parameters of their underlying neural generators are discussed in the light of the neurophysiological and psychological phenomena. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation thesis was, to transfer the insights of animal plasticity research onto the human brain and to draw a connection line between discrimination learning and the underlying neurophysiological changes. In a second step, these effects of discrimination learning are tested on speech perception.