PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Quentin Gaucher
AU  - Chloé Huetz
AU  - Boris Gourévitch
AU  - Jean-Marc Edeline
TI  - Cortical Inhibition Reduces Information Redundancy at Presentation of Communication Sounds in the Primary Auditory Cortex
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0079-13.2013
DP  - 2013 Jun 26
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 10713--10728
VI  - 33
IP  - 26
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/26/10713.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/26/10713.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2013 Jun 26; 33
AB  - In all sensory modalities, intracortical inhibition shapes the functional properties of cortical neurons but also influences the responses to natural stimuli. Studies performed in various species have revealed that auditory cortex neurons respond to conspecific vocalizations by temporal spike patterns displaying a high trial-to-trial reliability, which might result from precise timing between excitation and inhibition. Studying the guinea pig auditory cortex, we show that partial blockage of GABAA receptors by gabazine (GBZ) application (10 μm, a concentration that promotes expansion of cortical receptive fields) increased the evoked firing rate and the spike-timing reliability during presentation of communication sounds (conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations), whereas GABAB receptor antagonists [10 μm saclofen; 10–50 μm CGP55845 (p-3-aminopropyl-p-diethoxymethyl phosphoric acid)] had nonsignificant effects. Computing mutual information (MI) from the responses to vocalizations using either the evoked firing rate or the temporal spike patterns revealed that GBZ application increased the MI derived from the activity of single cortical site but did not change the MI derived from population activity. In addition, quantification of information redundancy showed that GBZ significantly increased redundancy at the population level. This result suggests that a potential role of intracortical inhibition is to reduce information redundancy during the processing of natural stimuli.