Auditory cortical and hippocampal local-field potentials to frequency deviant tones in urethane-anesthetized rats: An unexpected role of the sound frequencies themselves

• Auditory cortical and hippocampal electrical activity in anesthetized rats.
• Frequency-deviant tones presented with and without standard tone context.
• Context-dependent hippocampal but not auditory cortical responses to deviants.
• Sound frequencies alone explaining auditory cortical responses.

The human brain can automatically detect auditory changes, as indexed by the mismatch negativity of event-related potentials. The mechanisms that underlie this response are poorly understood. We recorded primary auditory cortical and hippocampal (dentate gyrus, CA1) local-field potentials to serial tones in urethane-anesthetized rats. In an oddball condition, a rare (deviant) tone (p = 0.11) randomly replaced a repeated (standard) tone. The deviant tone was either lower (2200, 2700, 3200, 3700 Hz) or higher (4300, 4800, 5300, 5800 Hz) in frequency than the standard tone (4000 Hz). In an equiprobability control condition, all nine tones were presented at random (p = 0.11). Differential responses to deviant tones relative to the standard tone were found in the auditory cortex and the dentate gyrus but not in CA1. Only in the dentate gyrus, the responses were found to be standard- (i.e., oddball condition-) specific. In the auditory cortex, the sound frequencies themselves sufficed to explain their generation. These findings tentatively suggest dissociation among non-contextual afferent, contextual afferent and auditory change detection processes. Most importantly, they remind us about the importance of strict control of physical sound features in mismatch negativity studies in animals.