Abstract
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.
Highlights
Speech activates broad spatiotemporal patterns of activity throughout the mammalian auditory system (Johnson et al, 2005; Liebenthal et al, 2005; Kilgard and Engineer, 2015)
Speech evokes spatiotemporal patterns of activity in auditory cortex. Which details of these neural representations matter for discrimination of speech sounds? Here we tested the idea that early activity is more important than late activity for the discrimination of initial consonants in spoken words
By optogenetically suppressing different temporal windows of speech-evoked activity in auditory cortex of trained mice, we found that both Early and Late suppression disrupted performance equivalently
Summary
Speech activates broad spatiotemporal patterns of activity throughout the mammalian auditory system (Johnson et al, 2005; Liebenthal et al, 2005; Kilgard and Engineer, 2015). The distinct neural representations evoked by different speech sounds are thought to underlie our ability to distinguish between them (Engineer et al, 2008; Centanni et al, 2013; Kilgard and Engineer, 2015) It is still unclear which details of these spatiotemporal activity patterns matter, and how neural processing of them leads to perceptual discrimination. Auditory cortex lesions cause much greater impairment of the discrimination of speech sounds that are truncated to the initial 40 ms than for full syllables (Porter et al, 2011)
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