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The Journal of Neuroscience, August 6, 2003, 23(18):7194-7206
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Auditory Cortical Responses Elicited in Awake Primates by Random Spectrum Stimuli
Dennis L. Barbour and
Xiaoqin Wang
Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical
Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
21205
Contrary to findings in subcortical auditory nuclei, auditory cortex
neurons have traditionally been described as spiking only at the onsets of
simple sounds such as pure tones or bandpass noise and to acoustic transients
in complex sounds. Furthermore, primary auditory cortex (A1) has traditionally
been described as mostly tone responsive and the lateral belt area of primates
as mostly noise responsive. The present study was designed to unify the study
of these two cortical areas using random spectrum stimuli (RSS), a new class
of parametric, wideband, stationary acoustic stimuli. We found that 60% of all
neurons encountered in A1 and the lateral belt of awake marmoset monkeys
(Callithrix jacchus) showed significant changes in firing rates in
response to RSS. Of these, 89% showed sustained spiking in response to one or
more individual RSS, a substantially greater percentage than would be expected
from traditional studies, indicating that RSS are well suited for studying
these two cortical areas. When firing rates elicited by RSS were used to
construct linear estimates of frequency tuning for these sustained responders,
the shape of the estimate function remained relatively constant throughout the
stimulus interval and across the stimulus properties of mean sound level,
spectral density, and spectral contrast. This finding indicates that frequency
tuning computed from RSS reflects a robust estimate of the actual tuning of a
neuron. Use of this estimate to predict rate responses to other RSS, however,
yielded poor results, implying that auditory cortex neurons integrate
information across frequency nonlinearly. No systematic difference in
prediction quality between A1 and the lateral belt could be detected.
Key words: auditory cortex; random spectrum stimuli; wideband; awake; primate; marmoset
Received Jan. 15, 2003;
revised May. 29, 2003;
accepted Jun. 12, 2003.
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