Attention is essential for navigating complex acoustic scenes, when the listener seeks to extract a foreground source while suppressing background acoustic clutter. This study explored the neural correlates of this perceptual ability by measuring rapid changes of spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) in primary auditory cortex during detection of a target tone embedded in noise. Compared to responses in the passive state, STRF gain decreased during task performance in most cells. By contrast, STRF shape changes were excitatory and specific, being strongest in cells with best frequencies near the target tone. The net effect of these adaptations was to accentuate the representation of the target tone relative to the noise, by enhancing responses of near-target cells to the tone during high-SNR tasks, while suppressing responses of far-from-target cells to the masking noise in low-SNR tasks. These adaptive STRF changes were largest in high-performance sessions, confirming a close correlation with behavior

A variety of attention-related effects have been demonstrated in primary auditory cortex (A1). However, an understanding of the functional role of higher auditory cortical areas in guiding attention to acoustic stimuli has been elusive. We recorded from neurons in two tonotopic cortical belt areas in the dorsal posterior ectosylvian gyrus (dPEG) of ferrets trained on a simple auditory discrimination task. Neurons in dPEG showed similar basic auditory tuning properties to A1, but during behavior we observed marked differences between these areas. In the belt areas, changes in neuronal firing rate and response dynamics greatly enhanced responses to target stimuli relative to distractors, allowing for greater attentional selection during active listening. Consistent with existing anatomical evidence, the pattern of sensory tuning and behavioral modulation in auditory belt cortex links the spectro-temporal representation of the whole acoustic scene in A1 to a more abstracted representation of task-relevant stimuli observed in frontal cortex.