The UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Otolaryngology-Headand Neck Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
J Neurophysiol. 2012 May;107(10):2594-603. doi: 10.1152/jn.01025.2011. Epub 2012 Feb 8.
In the primary auditory cortex, spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) are composed of multiple independent components that capture the processing of disparate stimulus aspects by any given neuron. The origin of these multidimensional stimulus filters in the central auditory system is unknown. To determine whether multicomponent STRFs emerge prior to the forebrain, we recorded from single neurons in the main obligatory station of the auditory midbrain, the inferior colliculus. By comparing results of different spike-triggered techniques, we found that the neural responses in the inferior colliculus can be accounted for by a single stimulus filter. This was observed for all temporal response patterns, from strongly phasic to tonic. Our results reveal that spectrotemporal stimulus encoding undergoes a fundamental transformation along the auditory neuraxis, with the emergence of multidimensional receptive fields beyond the auditory midbrain.
在初级听觉皮层中，频谱时间 receptive fields (STRFs) 由多个独立的成分组成，这些成分捕获了给定神经元对不同刺激方面的处理。中枢听觉系统中这些多维刺激滤波器的起源尚不清楚。为了确定多维 STRFs 是否先于大脑前区出现，我们在听觉中脑的主要必经站——下丘脑中记录了单个神经元的活动。通过比较不同尖峰触发技术的结果，我们发现下丘脑中的神经反应可以用单个刺激滤波器来解释。这一观察结果适用于从强相位到紧张的所有时间反应模式。我们的结果表明，随着多维感受野的出现，听觉神经轴上的频谱时间刺激编码经历了根本性的转变。
