Representations in auditory cortex

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Volumn 19, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 430-433

  Hromádka, Tomáš ^a   Zador, Anthony M ^a  

^a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AUDITORY CORTEX; AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION; AUDITORY STIMULATION; AUDITORY THRESHOLD; BEHAVIOR; BRAIN NERVE CELL; NERVE CELL MEMBRANE POTENTIAL; NONHUMAN; OLFACTORY CORTEX; PRIORITY JOURNAL; REVIEW; SOMATOSENSORY CORTEX; STIMULUS RESPONSE; VISUAL CORTEX;

ACOUSTIC STIMULATION; ACTION POTENTIALS; ANIMALS; AUDITORY CORTEX; AUDITORY PATHWAYS; AUDITORY PERCEPTION; EVOKED POTENTIALS, AUDITORY; NEURONS;

EID: 69449089290     PISSN: 09594388     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2009.07.009     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. DeWeese M.R., Wehr M., and Zador A.M. Binary spiking in auditory cortex. J Neurosci 23 21 (2003) 7940-7949. First report demonstrating that spike count variability of cortical neurons can be much lower than previously suspected. The authors identified a population of binary neurons with very low spike count variability, thus ruling out Poisson model as a universal description of cortical activity. Many neurons also exhibited extremely high spike time reliability with jitter of less than 1 ms.
2. Heil P. First-spike latency of auditory neurons revisited. Curr Opin Neurobiol 14 4 (2004) 461-467
3. Galambos R. Neural mechanisms of audition. Physiol Rev 34 (1954) 497-522
4. Lu T., Liang L., and Wang X. Temporal and rate representations of time-varying signals in the auditory cortex of awake primates. Nat Neurosci 4 11 (2001) 1131-1138. The authors identified a population of cortical neurons in the awake marmoset that exhibit sustained firing in response to fast click trains. Such sustained firing is rarely seen in many standard anesthetized preparations.
5. Barbour D.L., and Wang X. Auditory cortical responses elicited in awake primates by random spectrum stimuli. J Neurosci 23 18 (2003) 7194-7206
6. Gaese B.H., and Ostwald J. Complexity and temporal dynamics of frequency coding in the awake rat auditory cortex. Eur J Neurosci 18 9 (2003) 2638-2652
7. Wang X., Lu T., Snider R.K., and Liang L. Sustained firing in auditory cortex evoked by preferred stimuli. Nature 435 7040 (2005) 341-346. By varying frequency, bandwidth, amplitude modulation, and frequency modulation, the authors showed that many neurons in auditory cortex of awake marmosets were capable of sustained firing in response to their preferred stimuli, while responding transiently to their non-preferred stimuli.
8. Hromádka T., Deweese M.R., and Zador A.M. Sparse representation of sounds in the unanesthetized auditory cortex. PLoS Biol 6 1 (2008) e16. The authors used cell-attached recordings in auditory cortex of awake head-fixed rats to estimate population response to simple and complex sounds. Only about 5% of neurons responded vigorously at any given moment, suggesting that population activity was sparse.
9. Vinje W.E., and Gallant J.L. Sparse coding and decorrelation in primary visual cortex during natural vision. Science 287 5456 (2000) 1273-1276
10. Olshausen B.A., and Field D.J. Sparse coding of sensory inputs. Curr Opin Neurobiol 14 4 (2004) 481-487
11. Brecht M., Schneider M., Sakmann B., and Margrie T.W. Whisker movements evoked by stimulation of single pyramidal cells in rat motor cortex. Nature 427 6976 (2004) 704-710
12. Kerr J.N., Greenberg D., and Helmchen F. Imaging input and output of neocortical networks in vivo. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 102 39 (2005) 14063-14068
13. Rinberg D., Koulakov A., and Gelperin A. Sparse odor coding in awake behaving mice. J Neurosci 26 34 (2006) 8857-8865
14. Bair W., and Koch C. Temporal precision of spike trains in extrastriate cortex of the behaving macaque monkey. Neural Comput 8 6 (1996) 1185-1202
15. Buracas G.T., Zador A.M., DeWeese M.R., and Albright T.D. Efficient discrimination of temporal patterns by motion-sensitive neurons in primate visual cortex. Neuron 20 5 (1998) 959-969
16. Elhilali M., Fritz J.B., Klein D.J., Simon J.Z., and Shamma S.A. Dynamics of precise spike timing in primary auditory cortex. J Neurosci 24 5 (2004) 1159-1172
17. Schnupp J.W., Hall T.M., Kokelaar R.F., and Ahmed B. Plasticity of temporal pattern codes for vocalization stimuli in primary auditory cortex. J Neurosci 26 18 (2006) 4785-4795
18. Shadlen M.N., and Newsome W.T. The variable discharge of cortical neurons: implications for connectivity, computation, and information coding. J Neurosci 18 10 (1998) 3870-3896
19. Chimoto S., Kitama T., Qin L., Sakayori S., and Sato Y. Tonal response patterns of primary auditory cortex neurons in alert cats. Brain Res 934 1 (2002) 34-42
20. Braitenberg V., and Schuz A. Cortex: Statistics and Geometry of Neuronal Connectivity (1998), Springer, Berlin
21. Binzegger T., Douglas R.J., and Martin K.A.C. A quantitative map of the circuit of cat primary visual cortex. J Neurosci 24 39 (2004) 8441-8453
22. DeWeese M.R., and Zador A.M. Non-gaussian membrane potential dynamics imply sparse, synchronous activity in auditory cortex. J Neurosci 26 47 (2006) 12206-12218
23. Lampl I., Reichova I., and Ferster D. Synchronous membrane potential fluctuations in neurons of the cat visual cortex. Neuron 22 2 (1999) 361-374
24. Anderson J., Lampl I., Reichova I., Carandini M., and Ferster D. Stimulus dependence of two-state fluctuations of membrane potential in cat visual cortex. Nat Neurosci 3 6 (2000) 617-621
25. Okun M., and Lampl I. Instantaneous correlation of excitation and inhibition during ongoing and sensory-evoked activities. Nat Neurosci 11 5 (2008) 535-537
26. Hubel D.H., Henson C.O., Rupert A., and Galambos R. Attention units in the auditory cortex. Science 129 (1959) 1279-1280
27. Fritz J., Shamma S., Elhilali M., and Klein D. Rapid task-related plasticity of spectrotemporal receptive fields in primary auditory cortex. Nat Neurosci 6 11 (2003) 1216-1223. This paper studied effect of attention on response properties of single neurons in auditory cortex. In behaving ferrets, the authors demonstrated that attention can rapidly and adaptively reshape receptive field properties as determined by estimating spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs).
28. Otazu G.H., Tai L., Yang Y., and Zador A.M. Engaging in an auditory task suppresses responses in auditory cortex. Nat Neurosci 12 5 (2009) 646-654
29. Salzman C.D., Britten K.H., and Newsome W.T. Cortical microstimulation influences perceptual judgements of motion direction. Nature 346 6280 (1990) 174-177
30. Houweling A.R., and Brecht M. Behavioural report of single neuron stimulation in somatosensory cortex. Nature 451 7174 (2008) 65-68
31. Huber D., Petreanu L., Ghitani N., Ranade S., Hromádka T., Mainen Z., and Svoboda K. Sparse optical microstimulation in barrel cortex drives learned behaviour in freely moving mice. Nature 451 7174 (2008) 61-64. The first reports establishing that even a few cortical spikes are sufficient to drive behavioral decisions. Houweling and Brecht (29) trained rats to detect a low-intensity cortical microstimulation in somatosensory cortex and showed that rats could detect even single neuron stimulation. Huber and co-workers (30) introduced channelrhodopsin-2 to a small fraction of layer 2/3 neurons in somatosensory cortex of mice and showed that animals could detect brief epochs of cortical activity in as few as sixty neurons.
32. Yang Y., DeWeese M.R., Otazu G.H., and Zador A.M. Millisecond-scale differences in neural activity in auditory cortex can drive decisions. Nat Neurosci 11 11 (2008) 1262-1263. Yang et al. trained rats to discriminate patterns of cortical microstimulation delivered by chronically implanted electrodes. The authors showed that timing differences as low as 3 ms can be detected and used to drive animal's behavior.