Cortical Responses in Rats Predict Perceptual Sensitivities to Complex Sounds

The common assumption that perceptual sensitivities are related to neural representations of sensory stimuli has seldom been directly demonstrated. The authors analyzed the similarity of spike trains evoked by complex sounds in the rat auditory cortex and related cortical responses to performance in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioral neuroscience 2005-02, Vol.119 (1), p.256-264
Main Authors: Orduña, Itzel, Mercado, Eduardo, Gluck, Mark A, Merzenich, Michael M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Animal
Animals
Auditory Cortex
Auditory Cortex - physiology
Auditory Perception - physiology
Auditory Stimulation
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Discrimination Learning
Electrophysiology
Evoked Potentials
Evoked Potentials, Auditory - physiology
Female
Forecasting
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hormones
Male
Neurology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Rodents
Sound
Steroids
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Summary:The common assumption that perceptual sensitivities are related to neural representations of sensory stimuli has seldom been directly demonstrated. The authors analyzed the similarity of spike trains evoked by complex sounds in the rat auditory cortex and related cortical responses to performance in an auditory task. Rats initially learned to identify 2 highly different periodic, frequency-modulated sounds and then were tested with increasingly similar sounds. Rats correctly classified most novel sounds; their accuracy was negatively correlated with acoustic similarity. Rats discriminated novel sounds with slower modulation more accurately than sounds with faster modulation. This asymmetry was consistent with similarities in cortical representations of the sounds, demonstrating that perceptual sensitivities to complex sounds can be predicted from the cortical responses they evoke.
ISSN:0735-7044
1939-0084
DOI:10.1037/0735-7044.119.1.256