Homma Natsumi Y, Hullett Patrick W, Atencio Craig A, Schreiner Christoph E
Coleman Memorial Laboratory, Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA; Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
Coleman Memorial Laboratory, Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA; Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
Cell Rep. 2020 Mar 31;30(13):4445-4458.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.03.014.
During critical periods, neural circuits develop to form receptive fields that adapt to the sensory environment and enable optimal performance of relevant tasks. We hypothesized that early exposure to background noise can improve signal-in-noise processing, and the resulting receptive field plasticity in the primary auditory cortex can reveal functional principles guiding that important task. We raised rat pups in different spectro-temporal noise statistics during their auditory critical period. As adults, they showed enhanced behavioral performance in detecting vocalizations in noise. Concomitantly, encoding of vocalizations in noise in the primary auditory cortex improves with noise-rearing. Significantly, spectro-temporal modulation plasticity shifts cortical preferences away from the exposed noise statistics, thus reducing noise interference with the foreground sound representation. Auditory cortical plasticity shapes receptive field preferences to optimally extract foreground information in noisy environments during noise-rearing. Early noise exposure induces cortical circuits to implement efficient coding in the joint spectral and temporal modulation domain.
在关键期内，神经回路逐渐发育形成感受野，这些感受野会适应感觉环境并使相关任务能够实现最佳表现。我们推测，早期暴露于背景噪声中可改善信噪比处理能力，并且在初级听觉皮层中由此产生的感受野可塑性能够揭示指导该项重要任务的功能原理。我们在大鼠幼崽的听觉关键期将它们饲养在具有不同频谱-时间噪声统计特征的环境中。成年后，它们在噪声中检测发声的行为表现有所增强。与此同时，初级听觉皮层中噪声环境下发声的编码随着噪声饲养而得到改善。值得注意的是，频谱-时间调制可塑性使皮层偏好从暴露的噪声统计特征中转移出来，从而减少噪声对前景声音表征的干扰。听觉皮层可塑性塑造感受野偏好，以便在噪声饲养期间在嘈杂环境中最佳地提取前景信息。早期噪声暴露促使皮层回路在联合频谱和时间调制域中实现高效编码。
