Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Neuroscientist. 2010 Aug;16(4):453-69. doi: 10.1177/1073858410371009. Epub 2010 Jun 7.
We are able to rapidly recognize and localize the many sounds in our environment. We can describe any of these sounds in terms of various independent "features" such as their loudness, pitch, or position in space. However, we still know surprisingly little about how neurons in the auditory brain, specifically the auditory cortex, might form representations of these perceptual characteristics from the information that the ear provides about sound acoustics. In this article, the authors examine evidence that the auditory cortex is necessary for processing the pitch, timbre, and location of sounds, and document how neurons across multiple auditory cortical fields might represent these as trains of action potentials. They conclude by asking whether neurons in different regions of the auditory cortex might not be simply sensitive to each of these three sound features but whether they might be selective for one of them. The few studies that have examined neural sensitivity to multiple sound attributes provide only limited support for neural selectivity within auditory cortex. Providing an explanation of the neural basis of feature invariance is thus one of the major challenges to sensory neuroscience obtaining the ultimate goal of understanding how neural firing patterns in the brain give rise to perception.
我们能够快速识别和定位我们环境中的许多声音。我们可以根据各种独立的“特征”来描述这些声音，例如它们的响度、音高或在空间中的位置。然而，我们对于听觉大脑中的神经元，特别是听觉皮层，如何从耳朵提供的有关声音声学的信息中形成这些感知特征的表示，仍然知之甚少。在本文中，作者研究了听觉皮层对于处理声音的音高、音色和位置是否必要的证据，并记录了多个听觉皮层区域中的神经元如何将这些特征表示为一连串的动作电位。最后，他们提出了一个问题，即听觉皮层的不同区域中的神经元是否不仅对这三个声音特征中的每一个都敏感，而是它们是否对其中一个特征具有选择性。少数研究了神经对多个声音属性的敏感性的研究仅为听觉皮层内的神经选择性提供了有限的支持。因此，解释特征不变性的神经基础是感觉神经科学面临的主要挑战之一，其最终目标是理解大脑中的神经放电模式如何产生感知。
