Binaural tuning of auditory units in the forebrain archistriatal gaze fields of the barn owl: local organization but no space map

Abstract

We identified a region in the archistriatum of the barn owl forebrain that contains neurons sensitive to auditory stimuli. Nearly all of these neurons are tuned for binaural localization cues. The archistriatum is known to be the primary source of motor-related output from the avian forebrain and, in barn owls, contributes to the control of gaze, much like the frontal eye fields in monkeys. The auditory region is located in the medial portion of the archistriatum, at the level of the anterior commissure, and is within the region of the archistriatum from which head saccades can be elicited by electrical microstimulation (see preceding companion article, Knudsen et al., 1995). Free-field measurements revealed that auditory sites have large, spatial receptive fields. However, within these large receptive fields, responses are tuned sharply for sound source location. Dichotic measurements showed that auditory sites are tuned broadly for frequency and that the majority are tuned to particular values of interaural time differences and interaural level differences, the principal cues used by barn owls for sound localization. The tuning of sites to these binaural cues is essentially independent of sound level. The auditory properties of units in the medial archistriatum are similar to those of units in the optic tectum, a structure that also contributes to gaze control. Unlike the optic tectum, however, the auditory region of the archistriatum does not contain a single, continuous auditory map of space. Instead, it is organized into dorsoventral clusters of sites with similar binaural (spatial) tuning. The different representations of auditory space in closely related structures in the forebrain (archistriatum) and midbrain (optic tectum) probably reflect the fact that the forebrain contributes to a wide variety of sensorimotor tasks more complicated than gaze control.