Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 41, Issue 1, Pages 284-297Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1112-20.2020
Keywords
Inferior Colliculus; auditory discrimination; subcortical plasticity
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [DC010439, DC012124]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study found that task engagement can modulate sound coding in the auditory midbrain, with little effect on the central IC but significant modulation in noncentral areas. This led to enhanced responses for target tones compared to distractor noise, increasing neural discriminability between the two.
While task-dependent changes have been demonstrated in auditory cortex for a number of behavioral paradigms and mammalian species, less is known about how behavioral state can influence neural coding in the midbrain areas that provide auditory information to cortex. We measured single-unit activity in the inferior colliculus (IC) of common marmosets of both sexes while they performed a tone-in-noise detection task and during passive presentation of identical task stimuli. In contrast to our previous study in the ferret IC, task engagement had little effect on sound-evoked activity in central (lemniscal) IC of the marmoset. However, activity was significantly modulated in noncentral fields, where responses were selectively enhanced for the target tone relative to the distractor noise. This led to an increase in neural discriminability between target and distractors. The results confirm that task engagement can modulate sound coding in the auditory midbrain, and support a hypothesis that subcortical pathways can mediate highly trained auditory behaviors.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available