Abstract
Rapid task-related plasticity is a neural correlate of selective attention in primary auditory cortex (A1). Top-down feedback from higher-order cortex may drive task-related plasticity in A1, characterized by enhanced neural representation of behaviorally meaningful sounds during auditory task performance. Since intracortical connectivity is greater within A1 layers 2/3 (L2/3) than in layers 4–6 (L4–6), we hypothesized that enhanced representation of behaviorally meaningful sounds might be greater in A1 L2/3 than L4–6. To test this hypothesis and study the laminar profile of task-related plasticity, we trained 2 ferrets to detect pure tones while we recorded laminar activity across a 1.8 mm depth in A1. In each experiment we analyzed high-gamma local field potentials (LFPs) and multi-unit spiking in response to identical acoustic stimuli during both passive listening and active task performance. We found that neural responses to auditory targets were enhanced during task performance, and target enhancement was greater in L2/3 than in L4–6. Spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) computed from both high-gamma LFPs and multi-unit spiking showed similar increases in auditory target selectivity, also greatest in L2/3. Our results suggest that activity within intracortical networks plays a key role in the underlying neural mechanisms of selective attention.
Highlights
Selective attention is believed to facilitate auditory task performance by enhancing neural representation of behaviorally meaningful sounds[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
During task performance, we found that neural responses to targets were enhanced relative to reference responses, and target enhancement was greater in superficial layer 2/3 (L2/3) than middle-deep layers 4–6 (L4–6)
We recorded laminar profiles of neural activity in A1 during the performance of a pure-tone detection task and found that task-related plasticity was greater in L2/3 than in L4–6
Summary
Selective attention is believed to facilitate auditory task performance by enhancing neural representation of behaviorally meaningful sounds[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Task-related plasticity is a neural correlate of selective attention that is characterized by transient changes in both the gain of neuronal responses to auditory targets, and the shape of spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs)[4,6,7]. Intermodal attention-related suppressive effects predominated neural responses in superficial cortical layers, yet response enhancement was dominant in middle-deep layers[18]. We hypothesized that task-related plasticity might be (1) greater in superficial L2/3 than in middle-deep L4–6, and (2) similar for multi-unit spiking and high-gamma LFPs
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