Functional congruity in local auditory cortical microcircuits

Synchronous spiking events between pairs of neurons revealed that simultaneous 'Bicellular' spikes, in addition to carrying higher stimulus information than non-synchronized spikes, encoded faster modulation frequencies. Bicellular functional differences to the best matched of the paired neurons could be substantial. Bicellular nonlinearities showed that synchronous spikes act to transmit stimulus information with higher fidelity and precision than non-synchronous spikes of the individual neurons, thus, likely enhancing stimulus feature selectivity in their target neurons. Overall, the well-correlated and temporally precise processing within local subnetworks of cat AI showed laminar-dependent functional diversity in spectrotemporal processing, despite high intra-columnar congruity in frequency preference.