Spectrotemporal receptive fields during spindling and non-spindling epochs in cat primary auditory cortex

It was often thought that synchronized rhythmic epochs of spindle waves disconnect thalamo-cortical system from incoming sensory signals. The present study addresses this issue by simultaneous extracellular action potential and local field potential (LFP) recordings from primary auditory cortex of ketamine-anesthetized cats during spindling activity. We compared cortical spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRF) obtained during spindling and non-spindling epochs. The basic spectro-temporal parameters of “spindling” and “non-spindling” STRFs were similar. However, the peak-firing rate at the best frequency was significantly enhanced during spindling epochs. This enhancement was mainly caused by the increased probability of a stimulus to evoke spikes (effectiveness of stimuli) during spindling as compared with non-spindling epochs. Augmented LFPs associated with effective stimuli and increased single-unit pair correlations during spindling epochs suggested higher synchrony of thalamo-cortical inputs during spindling that resulted in increased effectiveness of stimuli presented during spindling activity. The neuronal firing rate, both stimulus-driven and spontaneous, was higher during spindling as compared with non-spindling epochs. Overall, our results suggests that thalamic cells during spindling respond to incoming stimuli-related inputs and, moreover, cause more powerful stimulus-related or spontaneous activation of the cortex.