Auditory Cortical Detection and Discrimination Correlates with Communicative Significance.docVIP

o PL SBIOLOGY AuditoryCorticalDetection andDiscriminationCorrelates withCommunicativeSignificance Robert C.Liu1,2*,Christoph E.Schreiner3,4 1DepartmentofBiology,EmoryUniversity,Atlanta,Georgia,UnitedStatesofAmerica,2CenterforBehavioralNeuroscience,Atlanta,Georgia,UnitedStatesofAmerica, 3 W. M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 4 Department of Otolaryngology–HeadandNeckSurgery,UniversityofCaliforniaatSanFrancisco,SanFrancisco,California,UnitedStatesofAmerica, Plasticity studies suggest that behavioral relevance can change the cortical processing of trained or conditioned sensorystimuli.However,whetherthisoccursinthecontextofnaturalcommunication,wherestimulussignificanceis acquired through social interaction, has not been well investigated, perhaps because neural responses to species- specificvocalizationscanbedifficulttointerpretwithinasystematicframework.Theultrasoniccommunicationsystem betweenisolatedmousepupsandadultfemalesthateitherdoordonotrecognizethecalls’significanceprovidesan opportunitytoexplorethisissue.Weappliedaninformation-basedanalysistomulti-andsingleunitdatacollected fromanesthetizedmothersandpup-na?¨vefemalestoquantifyhowthecommunicativesignificanceofpupcallsaffects theirencodingintheauditorycortex.Thetimingandmagnitudeofinformationthatcorticalresponsesconvey(ata2- ms resolution) for pup call detection and discrimination was significantly improved in mothers compared to na?¨ve females, most likely because of changes in call frequency encoding. This was not the case for a non-natural sound ensemble outside the mouse vocalization repertoire. The results demonstrate that a sensory cortical change in the timing code for communication sounds is correlated with the vocalizations’ behavioral relevance, potentially enhancingfunctionalprocessingbyimprovingitssignaltonoiseratio. Citation:LiuRC,SchreinerCE(2007)Auditorycorticaldetectionanddiscriminationc