Temporal integration at consecutive processing stages in the auditory pathway of the grasshopper

Wirtssohn, Sarah; Ronacher, Bernhard

doi:10.1152/jn.00390.2014

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…An alternate possibility is that the activity reported here reflects the recruitment of circuits that exist in order to retain information in working memory and provide no function during passive listening. A functional role for this activity appears plausible, however, given the requirement of temporal integration in auditory perception in all species, from insects 68 to humans 69 . Beyond the auditory domain, multi-sensory integration requires combining sensory information from multiple cortical areas with different latencies and temporal dynamics 70 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-stimulatory activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation during passive listening

Cooke

Lee

Bartlett

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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Under certain circumstances, cortical neurons are capable of elevating their firing for long durations in the absence of a stimulus. Such activity has typically been observed and interpreted in the context of performance of a behavioural task. Here we investigated whether post-stimulatory activity is observed in auditory cortex and the medial geniculate body of the thalamus in the absence of any explicit behavioural task. We recorded spiking activity from single units in the auditory cortex (fields A1, R and RT) and auditory thalamus of awake, passively-listening marmosets. We observed poststimulatory activity that lasted for hundreds of milliseconds following the termination of the acoustic stimulus. post-stimulatory activity was observed following both adapting, sustained and suppressed response profiles during the stimulus. These response types were observed across all cortical fields tested, but were largely absent from the auditory thalamus. As well as being of shorter duration, thalamic post-stimulatory activity emerged following a longer latency than in cortex, indicating that post-stimulatory activity may be generated within auditory cortex during passive listening. Given that these responses were observed in the absence of an explicit behavioural task, post-stimulatory activity in sensory cortex may play a functional role in processes such as echoic memory and temporal integration that occur during passive listening. Neurons in a number of cortical areas have been found to fire for durations on the order of seconds in the absence of sensory stimulation 1-7. This phenomenon was first described in the context of working memory tasks 8. In such tasks, subjects are typically presented with a cue and are required to respond after a delay period, during which the cue is no longer available. Neurons in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of macaque have been found to fire continuously during such delay periods, providing a possible substrate for the maintenance of information in working memory 1,2,6,9-14. In keeping with this proposed function, suppressing this activity has been shown to impair performance on working memory tasks 15-17. Such activity has been found to carry spatial information such as the location of visual stimulus 1,3-5 as well as the direction of a forthcoming saccade 6. Persistent activity has been reported in multiple cortical areas with differing functional properties. The intrinsic timescales of neural activity have been found to vary between cortical regions 18 in a manner that predicts the functional properties of persistent activity across cortical regions 19,20. "In addition to prefrontal activity, sensory areas have been found to encode stimulus information across a delay period in the form of post-stimulatory activity. In a tone discrimination task where the tones were separated by a one-second delay period, neurons in the auditory cortex of the macaque were found to elevate their firing during the delay period 7. The presence of persistent delay period activity in auditory cortex d...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-stimulatory activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation during passive listening

Cooke

Lee

Bartlett

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…A functional role for this activity appears plausible, however, given the requirement of temporal integration in auditory perception in all species, from insects [43] to humans [44]. Investigating the function of activity observed in the absence of a behavioural task is particularly challenging however.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Persistent activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation

Cooke

Lee

Bartlett

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Persistent activity, the elevated firing of a neuron after the termination of a stimulus, is hypothesized to play a critical role in working memory. This form of activity is therefore typically studied within the context of a behavioural task that includes a working memory component. Here we investigated whether persistent activity is observed in sensory cortex and thalamus in the absence of any explicit behavioural task. We recorded spiking activity from single units in the auditory cortex (fields A1, R and RT) and thalamus of awake, passively-listening marmosets. We observed persistent activity that lasted for hundreds of milliseconds following the termination of the acoustic stimulus, in the absence of a task. Persistent activity was observed following both adapting and sustained responses during the stimulus and showed similar stimulus tuning to these evoked responses. Persistent activity was also observed following suppression in firing during the stimulus. These response types were observed across all cortical fields tested, but were largely absent from thalamus. As well as being of shorter duration, thalamic persistent activity emerged following a longer latency than in cortex, indicating that persistent activity may be generated within auditory cortex during passive listening. Given that these responses were observed in the absence of a explicit behavioural task, persistent activity in sensory cortex may have functional importance beyond storing task-relevant information in working memory.

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Response recovery in the locust auditory pathway

Wirtssohn

Ronacher

2016

Journal of Neurophysiology

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Temporal resolution and the time courses of recovery from acute adaptation of neurons in the auditory pathway of the grasshopper Locusta migratoria were investigated with a response recovery paradigm. We stimulated with a series of single click and click pair stimuli while performing intracellular recordings from neurons at three processing stages: receptors and first and second order interneurons. The response to the second click was expressed relative to the single click response. This allowed the uncovering of the basic temporal resolution in these neurons. The effect of adaptation increased with processing layer. While neurons in the auditory periphery displayed a steady response recovery after a short initial adaptation, many interneurons showed nonlinear effects: most prominent a long-lasting suppression of the response to the second click in a pair, as well as a gain in response if a click was preceded by a click a few milliseconds before. Our results reveal a distributed temporal filtering of input at an early auditory processing stage. This set of specified filters is very likely homologous across grasshopper species and thus forms the neurophysiological basis for extracting relevant information from a variety of different temporal signals. Interestingly, in terms of spike timing precision neurons at all three processing layers recovered very fast, within 20 ms. Spike waveform analysis of several neuron types did not sufficiently explain the response recovery profiles implemented in these neurons, indicating that temporal resolution in neurons located at several processing layers of the auditory pathway is not necessarily limited by the spike duration and refractory period.

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Temporal integration at consecutive processing stages in the auditory pathway of the grasshopper

Cited by 3 publications

References 72 publications

Post-stimulatory activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation during passive listening

Post-stimulatory activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation during passive listening

Persistent activity in primate auditory cortex evoked by sensory stimulation

Response recovery in the locust auditory pathway

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