Representations of Cat Meows and Human Vowels in the Primary Auditory Cortex of Awake Cats

Abstract

Previous investigation of neural responses to cat meows in the primary auditory cortex (A1) of the anesthetized cat revealed a preponderance of phasic responses aligned to stimulus onset, offset, or envelope peaks. Sustained responses during stationary components of the stimulus were rarely seen. This observation motivates further investigation into how stationary components of naturalistic auditory stimuli are encoded by A1 neurons. We therefore explored neuronal response patterns in A1 of the awake cat using natural meows, time-reversed meows, and human vowels as stimuli. We found heterogeneous response types: approximately 2/3 of units classified as "phasic cells" responding only to amplitude envelope variations and the remaining 1/3 were "phasic-tonic cells" with continuous responses during the stationary components. The classification was upheld across all stimuli tested for a given cell. The differences of phasic responses were correlated with amplitude-envelope differences in the early stimulus portion (<100 ms), whereas the differences between tonic responses were correlated with ongoing spectral differences in the later stimulus portion. Phasic-tonic cells usually had a characteristic frequency (CF) <5 kHz, which corresponded to the dominant spectral range of vocalizations, suggesting that the cells encode spectral information. Phasic cells had CFs across the tested frequency range (<16 kHz). Instantaneous firing rates for natural and time-reversed meows were different, but mean rates for different categories of stimuli were similar. Evidence for cat's A1 preferring conspecific meows was not found. These functionally heterogeneous responses may serve to encode ongoing changes in sound spectra or amplitude envelope occurring throughout the entirety of the sound stimulus.