Correlation between neural discharges in cat primary auditory cortex and tone-detection behaviors

Understanding the physiological role of the auditory cortex (AC) in acoustic perception is an essential issue in auditory neuroscience. By comparing sound discrimination behaviors in animals before and after AC lesion, many studies have demonstrated that AC is necessary for the perceptual process of human vowels and animal vocalizations, but is not necessary to discriminate simple acoustic parameters such as sound onset, intensity and duration. Because a lesion study cannot fully reveal the function of AC under normal conditions, in this study, we combined electrophysiological recording and psychophysical experiments on the same animal to investigate whether AC is involved in a simple auditory task. We recorded the neural activities of the primary auditory cortex (A1) using implanted electrodes, while freely-moving cats performed a tone-detection task in which they were required to lick a metal tube to obtain a food reward after hearing a tone pip. The performance of the cats’ behavioral response increased with the increase of tone intensity, and the neural activities of A1 covaried with the behavioral performance. Also, whether the tone-detection behavior was interfered by a wideband noise was dependent on whether the tone-evoked neural response was masked by the noise-evoked response. Our results did not support that A1 neurons directly associate with the cat's behavioral decision; instead, they may mainly generate a neural representation of stimulus amplitude for further processing to determine whether a tone occurred or not.

► Neural activities were recorded from A1 of free-moving cats.
► Cats performed a behavioral task to detect a tone in silent and noise environments.
► The cat's behavioral performance correlated with the population neural activities of A1.
► A1 neurons did not directly associate with the cat's decision of behavioral response.