Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PT, UK.
J Neurosci. 2011 Oct 12;31(41):14565-76. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2074-11.2011.
We can recognize the melody of a familiar song when it is played on different musical instruments. Similarly, an animal must be able to recognize a warning call whether the caller has a high-pitched female or a lower-pitched male voice, and whether they are sitting in a tree to the left or right. This type of perceptual invariance to "nuisance" parameters comes easily to listeners, but it is unknown whether or how such robust representations of sounds are formed at the level of sensory cortex. In this study, we investigate whether neurons in both core and belt areas of ferret auditory cortex can robustly represent the pitch, formant frequencies, or azimuthal location of artificial vowel sounds while the other two attributes vary. We found that the spike rates of the majority of cortical neurons that are driven by artificial vowels carry robust representations of these features, but the most informative temporal response windows differ from neuron to neuron and across five auditory cortical fields. Furthermore, individual neurons can represent multiple features of sounds unambiguously by independently modulating their spike rates within distinct time windows. Such multiplexing may be critical to identifying sounds that vary along more than one perceptual dimension. Finally, we observed that formant information is encoded in cortex earlier than pitch information, and we show that this time course matches ferrets' behavioral reaction time differences on a change detection task.
当熟悉的歌曲在不同乐器上演奏时,我们可以识别出旋律。同样,动物必须能够识别警告叫声,无论呼叫者是高音调的雌性还是低音调的雄性,以及它们是坐在左侧还是右侧的树上。这种对“干扰”参数的感知不变性对听众来说轻而易举,但尚不清楚在感觉皮层水平上是否以及如何形成这种对声音的强大表示。在这项研究中,我们调查了在其他两个属性变化的情况下,雪貂听觉皮层的核心区和带状区的神经元是否可以对人工元音的音高、共振峰频率或方位进行强有力的表示。我们发现,大多数受人工元音驱动的皮质神经元的尖峰率都能对这些特征进行有力的表示,但最具信息量的时间响应窗口因神经元而异,并且跨越五个听觉皮层区域。此外,单个神经元可以通过在不同的时间窗口内独立调节其尖峰率来明确地表示声音的多个特征。这种复用对于识别在多个感知维度上变化的声音可能至关重要。最后,我们观察到共振峰信息在皮质中比音高信息更早地被编码,并且我们表明,该时间过程与雪貂在变化检测任务中的行为反应时间差异相匹配。