Decoding contextual influences on auditory perception from primary auditory cortex.

ABSTRACT: Perception can be highly dependent on stimulus context, but whether and how sensory areas encode the context remains uncertain. We used an ambiguous auditory stimulus - a tritone pair - to investigate the neural activity associated with a preceding contextual stimulus that strongly influenced the tritone pair's perception: either as an ascending or a descending step in pitch. We recorded single-unit responses from a population of auditory cortical cells in awake ferrets listening to the tritone pairs preceded by the contextual stimulus. We find that the responses adapt locally to the contextual stimulus, consistent with human MEG recordings from the auditory cortex under the same conditions. Decoding the population responses demonstrates that pitch-change selective cells are able to predic

SUBMITTER: Englitz B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10769425 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature