Little is known about the mechanisms that allow the cortex to selectively improve the neural representations of behaviorally important stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. Diffuse neuromodulatory systems may facilitate cortical plasticity by acting as teachers to mark important stimuli. This study demonstrates that episodic electrical stimulation of the nucleus basalis, paired with an auditory stimulus, results in a massive progressive reorganization of the primary auditory cortex in the adult rat. Receptive field sizes can be narrowed, broadened, or left unaltered depending on specific parameters of the acoustic stimulus paired with nucleus basalis activation. This differential plasticity parallels the receptive field remodeling that results from different types of behavioral training. This result suggests that input characteristics may be able to drive appropriate alterations of receptive fields independently of explicit knowledge of the task. These findings also suggest that the basal forebrain plays an active instructional role in representational plasticity.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/279/5357/1714.full.pdf

Cortical map reorganization enabled by nucleus basalis activity.

Joris, P. X., C. E. Schreiner, and A. Rees. Neural Processing of Amplitude-Modulated Sounds. Physiol Rev 84: 541–577, 2004; 10.1152/physrev.00029.2003.—Amplitude modulation (AM) is a temporal featu...

https://www.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/physrev.00029.2003

Neural processing of amplitude-modulated sounds.

https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/0896-6273(95)90092-6.pdf

Fear conditioning enhances short-latency auditory responses of lateral amygdala neurons: parallel recordings in the freely behaving rat.

How do neuronal populations in the auditory cortex represent acoustic stimuli? Although sound-evoked neural responses in the anesthetized auditory cortex are mainly transient, recent experiments in the unanesthetized preparation have emphasized subpopulations with other response properties. To quantify the relative contributions of these different subpopulations in the awake preparation, we have estimated the representation of sounds across the neuronal population using a representative ensemble of stimuli. We used cell-attached recording with a glass electrode, a method for which single-unit isolation does not depend on neuronal activity, to quantify the fraction of neurons engaged by acoustic stimuli (tones, frequency modulated sweeps, white-noise bursts, and natural stimuli) in the primary auditory cortex of awake head-fixed rats. We find that the population response is sparse, with stimuli typically eliciting high firing rates (>20 spikes/second) in less than 5% of neurons at any instant. Some neurons had very low spontaneous firing rates (<0.01 spikes/second). At the other extreme, some neurons had driven rates in excess of 50 spikes/second. Interestingly, the overall population response was well described by a lognormal distribution, rather than the exponential distribution that is often reported. Our results represent, to our knowledge, the first quantitative evidence for sparse representations of sounds in the unanesthetized auditory cortex. Our results are compatible with a model in which most neurons are silent much of the time, and in which representations are composed of small dynamic subsets of highly active neurons.

/pdf/sparse-representation-of-sounds-in-the-unanesthetized-4tyuil5zy1.pdf

Sparse Representation of Sounds in the Unanesthetized Auditory Cortex

Spontaneous events outline the realm of possible sensory responses in neocortical populations.

1. Responses of neurons in the auditory cortex of the albino rat were examined using microelectrode mapping techniques. Characteristic frequencies were determined for numerous electrode penetrations across the cortical surface in individual animals. A primary auditory area was identified in the posterolateral neocortex that was characterized by short latency responses to tone bursts and tonotopic organization with high frequencies represented rostrally and low frequencies, caudally. Within this area cells with similar characteristic frequencies were aligned in a dorsoventral orientation to form isofrequency contours. 2. Tuning curves obtained from primary auditory cortex were characteristically "V" shaped with Q10's ranging from 0.97 to 28.4. Maximum Q10 values increased monotonically with characteristic frequency (CF). The lowest thresholds at CF closely approximated the behavioral audiogram for the albino rat. Many neurons, however, had CF thresholds well above the behavioral limit. 3. Areas were found dorsal and ventral to the primary auditory cortex in which CF's were clearly discontinuous with the neighboring isofrequency contours. These data suggest the presence of other auditory fields, the detailed characteristics of which have yet to be examined.

/pdf/organization-of-auditory-cortex-in-the-albino-rat-sound-4lvozrhnlp.pdf

Organization of auditory cortex in the albino rat: sound frequency.

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/winer/publications_files/win99_lsk.pdf

Sharon L. Sally

Papers

Organization of auditory cortex in the albino rat: sound frequency.

Origins of medial geniculate body projections to physiologically defined zones of rat primary auditory cortex

Effects of superior olivary complex lesions on binaural responses in rat inferior colliculus.

Effects of superior olivary complex lesions on binaural responses in rat auditory cortex.