Disruption of Early or Late Epochs of Auditory Cortical Activity Impairs Speech Discrimination in Mice

Speech evokes robust activity in auditory cortex, which contains information over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. It remains unclear which components of these neural representations are causally involved in the perception and processing of speech sounds. Here we compared the relative importance of early and late speech-evoked activity for consonant discrimination. We trained mice to discriminate the initial consonants in spoken words, and then tested the effect of optogenetically suppressing different temporal windows of speech-evoked activity in auditory cortex. We found that both early and late suppression disrupted performance equivalently. These results suggest that mice are impaired at recognizing either type of disrupted representation because it differs from those learned in training.