Adaptive Computation for Sensing Acoustical Environmental Change in the Auditory Cortex

Abstract

Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is an evoked potential in response to an acoustical environmental change. Hypothesizing that, for animals to survive, MMN plays important roles in sensing environmental atmosphere, we investigated MMN in the auditory cortex of anesthetized rats in response to changes of frequency and harmony of test tone pulses. We first confirmed in behavioral experiments that rats could categorize consonant and dissonant chords, and thus distinguish this kind of sound feature quality, or ‘qualia.’ In physiological experiments, a surface microelectrode array mapped auditory evoked middle-latency response (P1) and MMN. We found that MMN could be elicited from the difference of qualia between consonant and dissonant chords and that the distributions of chord-elicited MMN were different from those of tone-elicited MMN. In response to pure tones, while middle-latency response (P1) was focally evoked from primary and anterior auditory cortex (A1, AAF), MMN spread toward ventral auditory cortex (VAF) in addition to A1 and AAF. In response to chords, MMN also widely spread over the auditory cortex, yet the largest activation spot was obtained in AAF. We also found an asymmetric property of MMN: Changes from low- to high-frequency tones and from dissonant to consonant chords produced larger MMN. Taken together, MMN in the auditory cortex can be elicited by changes of distinguishable qualia in an asymmetric form, suggesting that MMN reflects a detection of change of particular environmental atmosphere of sounds, which are potentially important for a survival.