Research reportCat's behavioral sensitivity and cortical spatiotemporal responses to the sweep direction of frequency-modulated tones

Neural responses to frequency modulated (FM) sweeps have been well investigated in single-units using electrophysiological recording methods. However, rare psychophysical experiments were conducted to investigate behavioral discrimination of FM-sweeps in the same species used in physiological experiments. Also, the previous studies have not focused on how the population of cortical neurons works together to encode the direction of FM-sweeps. To investigate the relation between the behavioral perception of FM direction and the population coding, we examined the cat's capability to discriminate the upward and downward FM-sweeps and recorded the neural responses to the same stimuli from the primary auditory cortex (A1) in different awake cats. We found that cats showed high performance to detect the change of direction of FM-sweeps, which linearly swept between 0.1 and 16 kHz in 40-160 ms duration; however, the behavioral performance obviously deteriorated when the sweeps were shortened to 10-20 ms. Physiological results indicated that the upward sweeps elicited a temporal sequence of responses among the A1 neurons, in which neurons tuning to low-frequencies responded earlier and those tuning to high-frequencies later, while the response sequence was reversed when A1 was driven by the downward sweeps. The rank-order of response latencies could provide a reliable discrimination of the FM direction, and the discrimination performance paralleled with the cat's behavioral performance. Our result suggests that the relative response timings in A1 contain enough information used by subsequent processing stages to make the decision of FM direction.

Research highlights▶ Cats can discriminate the direction of FM-sweeps. ▶ Their behavioral performance decrease with decreasing of the sweep duration. ▶ Relative time of neural responses in A1 contains reliable information of FM direction. ▶ Neural discrimination of A1 parallels with cat's behavioral discrimination.