The Neural Basis of Auditory Processing Disorder

Vincent Jerome Schmithorst¹, Scott Kerry Holland¹, Elena Plante²

Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) in children is diagnosed on the basis of behavioral tests which can be confounded by attentional or language deficits. We investigate the hypothesis that APD, as currently diagnosed by clinicians, stems from a deficit in cross-modal inhibition (the inhibition of neural processing of other sensory inputs). Performance of behavioral audiology measures was correlated with brain activation during a basic auditory stimulation task using fMRI. Results suggest that performance on tests of auditory processing used to diagnose APD is predicted by cross-modal inhibition of secondary visual areas and the parahippocampal gyrus, associated with repression of irrelevant information.