Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 39, Issue 2, Pages 271-280Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1188-18.2018
Keywords
amplitude modulation; auditory cortex; auditory thalamus; neural coding; pathway-specific; striatum
Categories
Funding
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [R01DC015531]
- Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Oregon
- NICHD [R25HD070817]
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Multiple parallel neural pathways link sound-related signals to behavioral responses. For instance, the striatum, a brain structure involved in action selection and reward-related learning, receives neuronal projections from both the auditory thalamus and auditory cortex. It is not clear whether sound information that reaches the striatum through these two pathways is redundant or complementary. We used an optogenetic approach in awake mice of both sexes to identify thalamostriatal and corticostriatal neurons during extracellular recordings, and characterized neural responses evoked by sounds of different frequencies and amplitude modulation rates. We found that neurons in both pathways encode sound frequency with similar fidelity, but display different coding strategies for amplitude modulated noise. Whereas corticostriatal neurons provide a more accurate representation of amplitude modulation rate in their overall firing rate, thalamostriatal neurons convey information about the precise timing of acoustic events. These results demonstrate that auditory thalamus and auditory cortex neurons provide complementary information to the striatum, and suggest that these pathways could be differentially recruited depending on the requirements of a sound-driven behavior.
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