Two parallel pathways for sound discrimination in the rat auditory cortex

2010 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. e273
Author(s):  
Go Ogawa ◽  
Masaharu Kudoh
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Parallel Pathways ◽  
Sound Discrimination

Cortical depression in the mouse auditory cortex after sound discrimination learning

2010 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinsuke Ohshima ◽  
Hiroaki Tsukano ◽  
Yamato Kubota ◽  
Kuniyuki Takahashi ◽  
Ryuichi Hishida ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Discrimination Learning ◽  
Cortical Depression ◽  
Sound Discrimination

scholarly journals Adaptive categorization of sound frequency does not require the auditory cortex in rats

2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 1137-1145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler L. Gimenez ◽  
Maja Lorenc ◽  
Santiago Jaramillo
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Motor Preparation ◽  
Cortical Circuits ◽  
Rapid Adaptation ◽  
Reversible Inactivation ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Auditory Thalamus ◽  
Sound Discrimination ◽  
Alternative Choice

A defining feature of adaptive behavior is our ability to change the way we interpret sensory stimuli depending on context. Rapid adaptation in behavior has been attributed to frontal cortical circuits, but it is not clear if sensory cortexes also play an essential role in such tasks. In this study we tested whether the auditory cortex was necessary for rapid adaptation in the interpretation of sounds. We used a two-alternative choice sound-categorization task for rats in which the boundary that separated two acoustic categories changed several times within a behavioral session. These shifts in the boundary resulted in changes in the rewarded action for a subset of stimuli. We found that extensive lesions of the auditory cortex did not impair the ability of rats to switch between categorization contingencies and sound discrimination performance was minimally impaired. Similar results were obtained after reversible inactivation of the auditory cortex with muscimol. In contrast, lesions of the auditory thalamus largely impaired discrimination performance and, as a result, the ability to modify behavior across contingencies. Thalamic lesions did not impair performance of a visual discrimination task, indicating that the effects were specific to audition and not to motor preparation or execution. These results suggest that subcortical outputs of the auditory thalamus can mediate rapid adaptation in the interpretation of sounds.

scholarly journals Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortex

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan J Morrill ◽  
James Bigelow ◽  
Jefferson DeKloe ◽  
Andrea R Hasenstaub
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Deep Layer ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Auditory Attention ◽  
Cortical Layers ◽  
Attention Shifting ◽  
Attentional Resources ◽  
Sound Discrimination ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Encoding Efficiency

In everyday behavior, sensory systems are in constant competition for attentional resources, but the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms of modality-selective attention remain largely uninvestigated. We conducted translaminar recordings in mouse auditory cortex (AC) during an audiovisual (AV) attention shifting task. Attending to sound elements in an AV stream reduced both pre-stimulus and stimulus-evoked spiking activity, primarily in deep layer neurons. Despite reduced spiking, stimulus decoder accuracy was preserved, suggesting improved sound encoding efficiency. Similarly, task-irrelevant probe stimuli during intertrial intervals evoked fewer spikes without impairing stimulus encoding, indicating that these attention influences generalized beyond training stimuli. Importantly, these spiking reductions predicted trial-to-trial behavioral accuracy during auditory attention, but not visual attention. Together, these findings suggest auditory attention facilitates sound discrimination by filtering sound-irrelevant spiking in AC, and that the deepest cortical layers may serve as a hub for integrating extramodal contextual information.

scholarly journals Acoustic context modulates natural sound discrimination in auditory cortex through frequency-specific adaptation

2021 ◽  
pp. JN-RM-0873-21
Author(s):  
Luciana López-Jury ◽  
Francisco García-Rosales ◽  
Eugenia González-Palomares ◽  
Manfred Kössl ◽  
Julio C. Hechavarria
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Specific Adaptation ◽  
Natural Sound ◽  
Sound Discrimination

scholarly journals Signal processing in auditory cortex underlies degraded speech sound discrimination in noise

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Town ◽  
Katherine C. Wood ◽  
Jennifer K. Bizley
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Cortical Neurons ◽  
Speech Sound ◽  
Continuous Exposure ◽  
Behavioral Performance ◽  
Related Activity ◽  
Hearing In Noise ◽  
Neural Populations ◽  
Sound Discrimination ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms

AbstractThe ability to recognize sounds in noise is a key part of hearing, and the mechanisms by which the brain identifies sounds in noise are of considerable interest to scientists, clinicians and engineers. Yet we know little about the necessity of regions such as auditory cortex for hearing in noise, or how cortical processing of sounds is adversely affected by noise. Here we used reversible cortical inactivation and extracellular electrophysiology in ferrets performing a vowel discrimination task to identify and understand the causal contribution of auditory cortex to hearing in noise. Cortical inactivation by cooling impaired task performance in noisy but not clean conditions, while responses of auditory cortical neurons were less informative about vowel identity in noise. Simulations mimicking cortical inactivation indicated that effects of inactivation were related to the loss of information about sounds represented across neural populations. The addition of noise to target sounds drove spiking activity in auditory cortex and recruitment of additional neural populations that were linked to degraded behavioral performance. To suppress noise-related activity, we used continuous exposure to background noise to adapt the auditory system and recover behavioral performance in both ferrets and humans. Inactivation by cooling revealed that the benefits of continuous exposure were not cortically dependent. Together our results highlight the importance of auditory cortex in sound discrimination in noise and the underlying mechanisms through which noise-related activity and adaptation shape hearing.

Human auditory-cortex mechanisms of preattentive sound discrimination

2000 ◽  
Vol 280 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juri D Kropotov ◽  
Kimmo Alho ◽  
Risto Näätänen ◽  
Valery A Ponomarev ◽  
Olga V Kropotova ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Human Auditory Cortex ◽  
Sound Discrimination

Visual Processing Affects the Neural Basis of Auditory Discrimination

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 2175-2184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Kislyuk ◽  
Riikka Möttönen ◽  
Mikko Sams
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Acoustic Stimulus ◽  
Mcgurk Effect ◽  
Visual Speech ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Visual Stream ◽  
Acoustic Stimuli ◽  
Sound Discrimination

The interaction between auditory and visual speech streams is a seamless and surprisingly effective process. An intriguing example is the “McGurk effect”: The acoustic syllable /ba/ presented simultaneously with a mouth articulating /ga/ is typically heard as /da/ [McGurk, H., & MacDonald, J. Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264, 746–748, 1976]. Previous studies have demonstrated the interaction of auditory and visual streams at the auditory cortex level, but the importance of these interactions for the qualitative perception change remained unclear because the change could result from interactions at higher processing levels as well. In our electroencephalogram experiment, we combined the McGurk effect with mismatch negativity (MMN), a response that is elicited in the auditory cortex at a latency of 100–250 msec by any above-threshold change in a sequence of repetitive sounds. An “odd-ball” sequence of acoustic stimuli consisting of frequent /va/ syllables (standards) and infrequent /ba/ syllables (deviants) was presented to 11 participants. Deviant stimuli in the unisensory acoustic stimulus sequence elicited a typical MMN, reflecting discrimination of acoustic features in the auditory cortex. When the acoustic stimuli were dubbed onto a video of a mouth constantly articulating /va/, the deviant acoustic /ba/ was heard as /va/ due to the McGurk effect and was indistinguishable from the standards. Importantly, such deviants did not elicit MMN, indicating that the auditory cortex failed to discriminate between the acoustic stimuli. Our findings show that visual stream can qualitatively change the auditory percept at the auditory cortex level, profoundly influencing the auditory cortex mechanisms underlying early sound discrimination.

scholarly journals Cortical and subcortical neurons discriminate sounds in noise on the sole basis of acoustic amplitude modulations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Souffi ◽  
C. Lorenzi ◽  
C. Huetz ◽  
J-M Edeline
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Cochlear Nucleus ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Subcortical Structures ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Temporal Cues ◽  
Stochastic Fluctuations ◽  
Sound Discrimination

AbstractHumans and animals maintain accurate sound discrimination in the presence of loud sources of background noise. It is commonly assumed that this ability relies on the robustness of auditory cortex responses. However, no attempt has been made to characterize neural discrimination of sounds masked by noise at each stage of the auditory system and disentangle the sub-effects of noise, namely the distortion of temporal cues conveyed by modulations in instantaneous amplitude and frequency, and the introduction of randomness (stochastic fluctuations in amplitude). Here, we measured neural discrimination between communication sounds masked by steady noise in the cochlear nucleus, inferior colliculus, auditory thalamus, primary and secondary auditory cortex at several signal-to-noise ratios. Sound discrimination by neuronal populations markedly decreased in each auditory structure, but collicular and thalamic populations showed better performance than cortical populations at each signal-to-noise ratio. Comparison with neural responses to tone-vocoded sounds revealed that the reduction in neural discrimination caused by noise was mainly driven by the attenuation of slow amplitude modulation cues, with the exception of the cochlear nucleus that showed a dramatic drop in discrimination caused by the randomness of noise. These results shed new light on the specific contributions of subcortical structures to robust sound encoding, and demonstrate that neural discrimination in the presence of background noise is mainly determined by the distortion of the slow temporal cues conveyed by communication sounds.

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