Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 28, Issue 15, Pages 3897-3910Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5366-07.2008
Keywords
fast-spiking; regular-spiking; spectrotemporal; auditory cortex; interneuron; receptive field
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Funding
- NIDCD NIH HHS [R01 DC002260, R01 DC002260-13, DC02260] Funding Source: Medline
- NIMH NIH HHS [MH 077970, P50 MH077970-020007, P50 MH077970] Funding Source: Medline
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Excitatory pyramidal neurons and inhibitory interneurons constitute the main elements of cortical circuitry and have distinctive morphologic and electrophysiological properties. Here, we differentiate them by analyzing the time course of their action potentials (APs) and characterizing their receptive field properties in auditory cortex. Pyramidal neurons have longer APs and discharge as regular-spiking units (RSUs), whereas basket and chandelier cells, which are inhibitory interneurons, have shorter APs and are fast-spiking units (FSUs). To compare these neuronal classes, we stimulated cat primary auditory cortex neurons with a dynamic moving ripple stimulus and constructed single-unit spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) and their associated nonlinearities. FSUs had shorter latencies, broader spectral tuning, greater stimulus specificity, and higher temporal precision than RSUs. The STRF structure of FSUs was more separable, suggesting more independence between spectral and temporal processing regimens. The nonlinearities associated with the two cell classes were indicative of higher feature selectivity for FSUs. These global functional differences between RSUs and FSUs suggest fundamental distinctions between putative excitatory and inhibitory interneurons that shape auditory cortical processing.
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