Abstract
The ability to detect unexpected or deviant events in natural scenes is critical for survival. In the auditory system, neurons from the midbrain to cortex adapt quickly to repeated stimuli but this adaptation does not fully generalize to other rare stimuli, a phenomenon called stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA). Most studies of SSA were conducted with pure tones of different frequencies, and it is by now well-established that SSA to tone frequency is strong and robust in auditory cortex. Here we tested SSA in the auditory cortex to the ear of stimulation using broadband noise. We show that cortical neurons adapt specifically to the ear of stimulation, and that the contrast between the responses to stimulation of the same ear when rare and when common depends on the binaural interaction class of the neurons.
Highlights
In nature, unexpected or deviant stimuli may indicate events with important behavioral consequences
CLASSIFICATION OF BINAURAL NEURONS The 129 single/multi-units recorded in the auditory cortex were divided into four groups according to their monaural response
EE neurons showed weak, but significant stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) to both ears, while EO neurons had SSA that depended on their binaural interaction class—the more suppressive the ipsilateral ear was on the responses to contralateral stimulation, the higher the stimulusspecific adaptation index (SI) tended to be
Summary
In nature, unexpected or deviant stimuli may indicate events with important behavioral consequences. SSA has been identified in the midbrain, thalamus, and auditory cortex (Ulanovsky et al, 2003; Pérez-González et al, 2005; Gutfreund and Knudsen, 2006; Malmierca et al, 2009; von der Behrens et al, 2009; Yu et al, 2009; Antunes et al, 2010; Reches et al, 2010; Zhao et al, 2011) In those studies, neurons were tested with two different frequencies. Two studies tested SSA for tone intensity, with inconclusive results (Ulanovsky et al, 2003; Farley et al, 2010), and there are reports of SSA for broadband stimuli (Nelken et al, 2013)
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