No abstract

Neural representation of acoustic stimuli in the mammal auditory cortex (AC) has been extensively studied using anesthetized or awake nonbehaving animals. Recently, several studies have shown that active engagement in an auditory behavioral task can substantially change the neuron response properties compared with when animals were passively listening to the same sounds; however, these studies mainly investigated the effect of behavioral state on the primary auditory cortex and the reported effects were inconsistent. Here, we examined the single-unit spike activities in both the primary and nonprimary areas along the dorsal-to-ventral direction of the cat's AC, when the cat was actively discriminating click-trains at different repetition rates and when it was passively listening to the same stimuli. We found that the changes due to task engagement were heterogeneous in the primary AC; some neurons showed significant increases in driven firing rate, others showed decreases. But in the nonprimary AC, task engagement predominantly enhanced the neural responses, resulting in a substantial improvement of the neural discriminability of click-trains. Additionally, our results revealed that neural responses synchronizing to click-trains gradually decreased along the dorsal-to-ventral direction of cat AC, while nonsynchronizing responses remained less changed. The present study provides new insights into the hierarchical organization of AC along the dorsal-to-ventral direction and highlights the importance of using behavioral animals to investigate the later stages of cortical processing.

No abstract

For humans and animals, the ability to discriminate speech and conspecific vocalizations is an important physiological assignment of the auditory system. To reveal the underlying neural mechanism, many electrophysiological studies have investigated the neural responses of the auditory cortex to conspecific vocalizations in monkeys. The data suggest that vocalizations may be hierarchically processed along an anterior/ventral stream from the primary auditory cortex (A1) to the ventral prefrontal cortex. To date, the organization of vocalization processing has not been well investigated in the auditory cortex of other mammals. In this study, we examined the spike activities of single neurons in two early auditory cortical regions with different anteroposterior locations: anterior auditory field (AAF) and posterior auditory field (PAF) in awake cats, as the animals were passively listening to forward and backward conspecific calls (meows) and human vowels. We found that the neural response patterns in PAF were more complex and had longer latency than those in AAF. The selectivity for different vocalizations based on the mean firing rate was low in both AAF and PAF, and not significantly different between them; however, more vocalization information was transmitted when the temporal response profiles were considered, and the maximum transmitted information by PAF neurons was higher than that by AAF neurons. Discrimination accuracy based on the activities of an ensemble of PAF neurons was also better than that of AAF neurons. Our results suggest that AAF and PAF are similar with regard to which vocalizations they represent but differ in the way they represent these vocalizations, and there may be a complex processing stream between them.