Department of Auditory Neuroscience, Institute of Experimental Medicine, Czech Academy of Sciences, Vídeňská 1083, 14220 Prague 4, Czech Republic.
Department of Technical Studies, College of Polytechnics, Tolstého 16, 58601 Jihlava, Czech Republic.
Neural Plast. 2018 May 30;2018:5903720. doi: 10.1155/2018/5903720. eCollection 2018.
It is well known that auditory experience during early development shapes response properties of auditory cortex (AC) neurons, influencing, for example, tonotopical arrangement, response thresholds and strength, or frequency selectivity. Here, we show that rearing rat pups in a complex acoustically enriched environment leads to an increased reliability of responses of AC neurons, affecting both the rate and the temporal codes. For a repetitive stimulus, the neurons exhibit a lower spike count variance, indicating a more stable rate coding. At the level of individual spikes, the discharge patterns of individual neurons show a higher degree of similarity across stimulus repetitions. Furthermore, the neurons follow more precisely the temporal course of the stimulus, as manifested by improved phase-locking to temporally modulated sounds. The changes are persistent and present up to adulthood. The results document that besides basic alterations of receptive fields presented in our previous study, the acoustic environment during the critical period of postnatal development also leads to a decreased stochasticity and a higher reproducibility of neuronal spiking patterns.
众所周知，早期发育过程中的听觉体验会塑造听觉皮层 (AC) 神经元的反应特性，影响例如音位排列、反应阈值和强度，或者频率选择性。在这里，我们表明，在复杂的声音丰富环境中饲养大鼠幼仔会导致 AC 神经元反应的可靠性增加，从而影响速率和时间编码。对于重复刺激，神经元的尖峰计数方差较低，表明更稳定的速率编码。在单个尖峰水平上，单个神经元的放电模式在刺激重复之间表现出更高的相似性。此外，神经元更精确地跟随刺激的时间进程，表现为对时间调制声音的相位锁定更好。这些变化是持久的，一直持续到成年期。研究结果表明，除了我们之前研究中呈现的感受野的基本改变之外，出生后发育的关键期内的听觉环境还会导致神经元放电模式的随机性降低和可重复性提高。
