Dynamics of auditory cortical activity during behavioural engagement and auditory perception

Behavioural engagement can enhance sensory perception. However, the neuronal mechanisms by which behavioural states affect stimulus perception remain poorly understood. Here we record from single units in auditory cortex of rats performing a self-initiated go/no-go auditory task. Self-initiation transforms cortical tuning curves and bidirectionally modulates stimulus-evoked activity patterns and improves auditory detection and recognition. Trial self-initiation decreases the rate of spontaneous activity in the majority of recorded cells. Optogenetic disruption of cortical activity before and during tone presentation shows that these changes in evoked and spontaneous activity are important for sound perception. Thus, behavioural engagement can prepare cortical circuits for sensory processing by dynamically changing sound representation and by controlling the pattern of spontaneous activity. Sensory perception is enhanced with behavioural engagement. Here the authors show that when rats initiate stimulus delivery in an auditory recognition task, activity of auditory cortex neurons is modulated and optogenetic disruption of this activity affects performance.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Nature Communications

• Publication date

  2017-02-08

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/ncomms14412PMID 28176787PMCID 5309852
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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