Omission responses in local field potentials in rat auditory cortex

Abstract

Background Non-invasive recordings of gross neural activity in humans often show responses to omitted stimuli in steady trains of identical stimuli. This has been taken as evidence for the neural coding of prediction or prediction error. However, evidence for such omission responses from invasive recordings of cellular-scale responses in animal models is scarce. Here, we sought to characterise omission responses using extracellular recordings in the auditory cortex of anaesthetised rats. We profiled omission responses across local field potentials (LFP), analogue multiunit activity (AMUA), and single/multi-unit spiking activity, using stimuli that were fixed-rate trains of acoustic noise bursts where 5% of bursts were randomly omitted. Results Significant omission responses were observed in LFP and AMUA signals, but not in spiking activity. These omission responses had a lower amplitude and longer latency than burst-evoked sensory responses, and omission response amplitude increased as a function of the number of preceding bursts. Conclusions Together, our findings show that omission responses are most robustly observed in LFP and AMUA signals (relative to spiking activity). This has implications for models of cortical processing that require many neurons to encode prediction errors in their spike output.

Hierarchical temporal prediction captures motion processing along the visual pathway

“…If the predictive features are learned, this suggests that while some neurons represent these features, a fraction of neurons in the cortex (or elsewhere) might represent the prediction error used to train the network. Indeed, there is evidence that some cortical neurons may represent prediction error ( Auksztulewicz et al, 2023 ; Fiser et al, 2016 ; Rubin et al, 2016 ).…”

Temporal prediction captures retinal spiking responses across animal species

“…Certain RGCs in the salamander and mouse retina have been reported to produce an omitted-stimulus response (OSR), generally thought to encode prediction or prediction errors [70]. RGCs exhibiting OSRs fire strongly to a violation in a periodic temporal pattern, such as an omitted flash within a steady dark flashing sequence [22].…”

Acetylcholine Modulates the Precision of Prediction Error in the Auditory Cortex

“…If a stimulus is not predicted, the difference between predicted and received inputs yields large prediction errors, while if a stimulus is constantly repeated, sensory learning enables more accurate predictions and a decrease in prediction error responses -a phenomenon referred to as repetition suppression (Auksztulewicz and Friston, 2016). Thus, nMM can be explained under the predictive coding framework (Carbajal and Malmierca, 2018;Parras et al, 2017), and recent studies that found LFP and spiking responses to omitted 32 tones in the rat auditory cortex (Auksztulewicz et al, 2023;Lao-Rodríguez et al, 2023), among others, strongly support this interpretation. However, predictions and prediction errors may also be modulated in a context-dependent manner, meaning that responses can be modulated and given precedence depending on the context in which the stimulus is perceived (Keller and Mrsic-Flogel, 2018).…”