Hippocampal-cerebellar involvement in enhancement of performance in word-based BRT with the presence of background noise: an initial fMRI study

Background noise may impose deleterious effects on cognitive processing. However, noise below the threshold level may increase the ability to detect stimuli via stochastic resonance mechanisms (SR). The present study investigates whether task performance is deteriorated or enhanced by 5-dB SNR and, if the task performance is enhanced, whether this facilitation in performance points to a particular neural area that serves to attenuate noise and/or increase effective task performance. The areas of interest are the cerebellum and hippocampus due to their roles in working memory (WM) and their lin...