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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access first published online on October 14, 2008
This version published online on October 24, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn184
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Spectrotemporal Receptive Fields in Anesthetized Cat Primary Auditory Cortex Are Context Dependent

Boris Gourévitch1, Arnaud Noreña2, Gregory Shaw1 and Jos J. Eggermont1

1 Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4, 2 Integrative and adaptive neurobiology laboratory, UMR 6149, Université de Provence/CNRS Centre St Charles, Pôle 3C—Case B, 3, Place Victor Hugo F—13331 Marseille Cedex 03, France

Address correspondence to Jos J. Eggermont, PhD, Department of Psychology, 2500 University Drive Northwest, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. Email: eggermon{at}ucalgary.ca.

In order to investigate how the auditory scene is analyzed and perceived, auditory spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) are generally used as a convenient way to describe how frequency and temporal sound information is encoded. However, using broadband sounds to estimate STRFs imperfectly reflects the way neurons process complex stimuli like conspecific vocalizations insofar as natural sounds often show limited bandwidth. Using recordings in the primary auditory cortex of anesthetized cats, we show that presentation of narrowband stimuli not including the best frequency of neurons provokes the appearance of residual peaks and increased firing rate at some specific spectral edges of stimuli compared with classical STRFs obtained from broadband stimuli. This result is the same for STRFs obtained from both spikes and local field potentials. Potential mechanisms likely involve release from inhibition. We thus emphasize some aspects of context dependency of STRFs, that is, how the balance of inhibitory and excitatory inputs is able to shape the neural response from the spectral content of stimuli.

Key Words: inhibition • local field potential • multipeaked neurons • multiunits • spectral edges

Updated to replace Figures 2, 4, 6, and 7.


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