Relating auditory evoked responses to the laminar phase dynamics in rats using mutual information

Abstract

This study aims to decrease the gap between invasive high-resolution data acquisition and non-invasive measurement in the animal model under auditory stimuli. We approach this problem by analyzing the degree of shared information between the phase of local field potentials (LFPs) of auditory cortices and the phase of auditory evoked responses (AER) at different frequency domains. It has been extensively illustrated in previous studies that the phase of evoked responses align reliably in presence of a repetitive stimulus. Yet this implies that changes in the instantaneous phase over a series of stimulus presentations must also be mirrored in the laminar activity. To estimate the impact of laminar specific activity on the AER dynamics over a series of acoustic stimulation, we employ an information theoretic approach (mutual information) for quantifying the relevant information encoded in the phase of laminar LFPs and AERs.