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Sound identity is represented robustly in auditory cortex during perceptual constancy

Town, SM; Wood, KC; Bizley, JK; (2018) Sound identity is represented robustly in auditory cortex during perceptual constancy. Nature Communications , 9 , Article 4786. 10.1038/s41467-018-07237-3. Green open access

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Abstract

Perceptual constancy requires neural representations that are selective for object identity, but also tolerant across identity-preserving transformations. How such representations arise in the brain and support perception remains unclear. Here, we study tolerant representation of sound identity in the auditory system by recording neural activity in auditory cortex of ferrets during perceptual constancy. Ferrets generalize vowel identity across variations in fundamental frequency, sound level and location, while neurons represent sound identity robustly across acoustic variations. Stimulus features are encoded with distinct time-courses in all conditions, however encoding of sound identity is delayed when animals fail to generalize and during passive listening. Neurons also encode information about task-irrelevant sound features, as well as animals' choices and accuracy, while population decoding out-performs animals' behavior. Our results show that during perceptual constancy, sound identity is represented robustly in auditory cortex across widely varying conditions, and behavioral generalization requires conserved timing of identity information.

Type: Article
Title: Sound identity is represented robustly in auditory cortex during perceptual constancy
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07237-3
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07237-3
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Animal physiology, Cortex, Decision, Sensory processing
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > The Ear Institute
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10061980
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