Change detection by thalamic reticular neurons

Yu, Xiongjie; Xu, Xinpeng; He, Shunping; He, Jufang

doi:10.1038/nn.2373

Cited by 150 publications

(157 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

147

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…It is an exciting feature of the auditory thalamus that the potential strength of SSA is anatomically segregated. So far, SSA in the vMGB as part of the lemniscal auditory pathway could not be detected at all (Ulanovsky et al, 2003(Ulanovsky et al, , 2004 or showed SSA only to a relatively limited degree (Anderson et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2009;Antunes et al, 2010). Here, we present significant SSA in the gerbil vMGB with an average DS differences of ϳ15%, which is comparable with the 30% described for the rat MGB as a whole (Yu et al, 2009).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

“…It is well known that the auditory cortex adjusts and improves signal processing at subcortical stages through frequency-dependent facilitation and inhibition acting on different timescales from short-term changes to long-term plasticity (He, 2003a;Yan et al, 2005;Winer, 2006;Suga, 2008). This makes it rather likely that the strong effects of SSA in the auditory cortex are relayed to the vMGB directly or via corticofugal projections to the inferior colliculus (IC) and the thalamic reticularis nucleus (TRN) in which, again, SSA has already been described (Malmierca et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in the Gerbil Primary Auditory Thalamus Is the Result of a Fast Frequency-Specific Habituation and Is Regulated by the Corticofugal System

Bäuerle¹,

Behrens²,

Kössl³

et al. 2011

Journal of Neuroscience

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The detection of novel and therefore potentially behavioral relevant stimuli is of fundamental importance for animals. In the auditory system, stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) resulting in stronger responses to rare compared with frequent stimuli was proposed as such a novelty detection mechanism. SSA is a now well established phenomenon found at different levels along the mammalian auditory pathway. It depends on various stimulus features, such as deviant probability, and may be an essential mechanism underlying perception of changes in sound statistics. We recorded neuronal responses from the ventral part of the medial geniculate body (vMGB) in Mongolian gerbils to determine details of the adaptation process that might indicate underlying neuronal mechanisms. Neurons in the vMGB exhibited a median spike rate change of 15.4% attributable to a fast habituation to the frequently presented standard stimulus. Accordingly, the main habituation effect could also be induced by the repetition of a few uniform tonal stimuli. The degree of habituation was frequency-specific, and comparison across simultaneously recorded units indicated that adaptation effects were apparently topographically organized. At the population level, stronger habituation effects were on average associated with the border regions of the frequency response areas. Finally, the pharmacological inactivation of the auditory cortex demonstrated that SSA in the vMGB is mainly regulated by the corticofugal system. Hence, these results indicate a more general function of SSA in the processing and analysis of auditory information than the term novelty detection suggests.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in the Gerbil Primary Auditory Thalamus Is the Result of a Fast Frequency-Specific Habituation and Is Regulated by the Corticofugal System

Bäuerle¹,

Behrens²,

Kössl³

et al. 2011

Journal of Neuroscience

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, the relevant depressing synapse may actually be at the collicular inputs to the thalamus. Additional thalamic mechanisms may be in play, like the strong interactions between the MGB and the thalamic reticular nucleus (40).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory abstraction from spectro-temporal features to coding auditory entities

Chechik

Nelken

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The auditory system extracts behaviorally relevant information from acoustic stimuli. The average activity in auditory cortex is known to be sensitive to spectro-temporal patterns in sounds. However, it is not known whether the auditory cortex also processes more abstract features of sounds, which may be more behaviorally relevant than spectro-temporal patterns. Using recordings from three stations of the auditory pathway, the inferior colliculus (IC), the ventral division of the medial geniculate body (MGB) of the thalamus, and the primary auditory cortex (A1) of the cat in response to natural sounds, we compared the amount of information that spikes contained about two aspects of the stimuli: spectro-temporal patterns, and abstract entities present in the same stimuli such as a bird chirp, its echoes, and the ambient noise. IC spikes conveyed on average approximately the same amount of information about spectro-temporal patterns as they conveyed about abstract auditory entities, but A1 and the MGB neurons conveyed on average three times more information about abstract auditory entities than about spectro-temporal patterns. Thus, the majority of neurons in auditory thalamus and cortex coded well the presence of abstract entities in the sounds without containing much information about their spectro-temporal structure, suggesting that they are sensitive to abstract features in these sounds.S ensory systems have evolved to extract relevant information from the continuous flux of sensory stimuli. The cascade of processing stations along a sensory pathway transforms the stimuli so that the higher brain areas can make behaviorally relevant decisions. In the visual system, these transformations have been shown to involve increasingly complex representations: Center-surround thalamic representations feed the simple and complex V1 neurons, eventually feeding face sensitive neurons, which generalize over a large class of behaviorally relevant stimuli (1). In the auditory system, cochlear nerve fibers at the periphery are narrowly tuned in frequency, and neurons in primary cortex have been shown to be sensitive to specific spectrotemporal (ST) patterns (2-4). However, it is unclear whether ST sensitivity fully reflects the information processing performed by cortical neurons. An alternative account of spectro-temporal sensitivity in A1 suggests that cortical neurons "inherit" their sensitivity to ST patterns from their afferent inputs. Indeed, even neurons in the inferior colliculus, the obligatory midbrain auditory station, are sensitive to ST patterns (5, 6).If this alternative hypothesis is true, then auditory cortical neurons may actually be extracting additional, and potentially more abstract, stimulus features. To characterize ST sensitivity, auditory neurons are often analyzed by computing the average stimulus that elicits spikes, yielding the so-called ST receptive field (STRF) (7). Unfortunately, the stimulus average may be a coarse descriptor of the complex features that excite neurons. For example, the average ...

show abstract

“…How neural systems detect such deviant sounds remains poorly understood, but it is known that this context-dependent task is achieved preattentively, at least in part. Auditory neurons in cats (Ulanovsky et al, 2003(Ulanovsky et al, , 2004 and rodents (Pérez-González et al, 2005;Anderson et al, 2009;Malmierca et al, 2009;von der Behrens et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2009;Antunes et al, 2010) habituate on short timescales to probabilistically recurring tones in a frequency-selective way [stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA)], so that responses are stronger when tones are deviant. This phenomenon is hypothesized to be involved in the "automatic" detection of deviant sounds in natural auditory scenes (Nelken and Ulanovsky, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-Scale Synchronized Activity during Vocal Deviance Detection in the Zebra Finch Auditory Forebrain

Beckers

Gahr

2012

Journal of Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Auditory systems bias responses to sounds that are unexpected on the basis of recent stimulus history, a phenomenon that has been widely studied using sequences of unmodulated tones (mismatch negativity; stimulus-specific adaptation). Such a paradigm, however, does not directly reflect problems that neural systems normally solve for adaptive behavior. We recorded multiunit responses in the caudomedial auditory forebrain of anesthetized zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) at 32 sites simultaneously, to contact calls that recur probabilistically at a rate that is used in communication. Neurons in secondary, but not primary, auditory areas respond preferentially to calls when they are unexpected (deviant) compared with the same calls when they are expected (standard). This response bias is predominantly due to sites more often not responding to standard events than to deviant events. When two call stimuli alternate between standard and deviant roles, most sites exhibit a response bias to deviant events of both stimuli. This suggests that biases are not based on a use-dependent decrease in response strength but involve a more complex mechanism that is sensitive to auditory deviance per se. Furthermore, between many secondary sites, responses are tightly synchronized, a phenomenon that is driven by internal neuronal interactions rather than by the timing of stimulus acoustic features. We hypothesize that this deviance-sensitive, internally synchronized network of neurons is involved in the involuntary capturing of attention by unexpected and behaviorally potentially relevant events in natural auditory scenes.

show abstract

Change detection by thalamic reticular neurons

Cited by 150 publications

References 33 publications

Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in the Gerbil Primary Auditory Thalamus Is the Result of a Fast Frequency-Specific Habituation and Is Regulated by the Corticofugal System

Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in the Gerbil Primary Auditory Thalamus Is the Result of a Fast Frequency-Specific Habituation and Is Regulated by the Corticofugal System

Auditory abstraction from spectro-temporal features to coding auditory entities

Large-Scale Synchronized Activity during Vocal Deviance Detection in the Zebra Finch Auditory Forebrain

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About