TY - JOUR T1 - Task Engagement Selectively Modulates Neural Correlations in Primary Auditory Cortex JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 7565 LP - 7574 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4094-14.2015 VL - 35 IS - 19 AU - Joshua D. Downer AU - Mamiko Niwa AU - Mitchell L. Sutter Y1 - 2015/05/13 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/19/7565.abstract N2 - Noise correlations (rnoise) between neurons can affect a neural population's discrimination capacity, even without changes in mean firing rates of neurons. rnoise, the degree to which the response variability of a pair of neurons is correlated, has been shown to change with attention with most reports showing a reduction in rnoise. However, the effect of reducing rnoise on sensory discrimination depends on many factors, including the tuning similarity, or tuning correlation (rtuning), between the pair. Theoretically, reducing rnoise should enhance sensory discrimination when the pair exhibits similar tuning, but should impair discrimination when tuning is dissimilar. We recorded from pairs of neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) under two conditions: while rhesus macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta) actively performed a threshold amplitude modulation (AM) detection task and while they sat passively awake. We report that, for pairs with similar AM tuning, average rnoise in A1 decreases when the animal performs the AM detection task compared with when sitting passively. For pairs with dissimilar tuning, the average rnoise did not significantly change between conditions. This suggests that attention-related modulation can target selective subcircuits to decorrelate noise. These results demonstrate that engagement in an auditory task enhances population coding in primary auditory cortex by selectively reducing deleterious rnoise and leaving beneficial rnoise intact. ER -