Abstract
Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex underlies our perception of sound sources in space remains unclear. Specifically, whether neurons in auditory cortex represent spatial cues or an integrated representation of auditory space across cues is not known. Here, we measured the spatial receptive fields of neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) while ferrets performed a relative localisation task. Manipulating the availability of binaural and spectral localisation cues had little impact on ferrets’ performance, or on neural spatial tuning. A subpopulation of neurons encoded spatial position consistently across localisation cue type. Furthermore, neural firing pattern decoders outperformed two-channel model decoders using population activity. Together, these observations suggest that A1 encodes the location of sound sources, as opposed to spatial cue values.
Highlights
Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex underlies our perception of sound sources in space remains unclear
Acoustic stimuli were either broadband noise (BBN, containing complete binaural and spectral cues), low-pass filtered noise (LPN: 3 kHz, containing ILDs and spectral cues and eliminating fine-structure ITDs)
Given that animals successfully performed the task across conditions, we predicted that any change in spatial tuning in A1 for BBN versus cuerestricted stimuli would be modest, and most marked for the BPN stimuli, which consistently elicited worse performance across ferrets
Summary
Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex underlies our perception of sound sources in space remains unclear. But not all, neurons in AC represent sound source location relative to the head (i.e., an egocentric representation, indicative of a cue-based representation8), it is unclear whether spatial modulation in auditory cortical neurons reflects tuning to specific localisation cues, or a cueinvariant integrated representation of source location. This is because most studies have not considered the effects of systematically manipulating the available localisation cues on coding of spatial location
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