Spectrotemporal sensitivities in rat auditory cortical neurons

Studies in several mammalian species have demonstrated that auditory cortical neurons respond strongly to single frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps, and that most responses are selective for sweep direction and/or rate. In the present study, we used extracellular recordings to examine how neurons in the auditory cortices of anesthetized rats respond to continuous, periodic trains of FM sweeps (described previously by deCharms et al., Science 280 (1998) pp. 1439-1444, as moving auditory gratings). Consistent with previous observations in owl monkeys, we found that the majority of cortical neurons responded selectively to trains of either up-sweeps or down-sweeps; selectivity for down-sweeps was most common. Periodic responses were typically evoked only by sweep trains with repetition rates less than 12 sweeps per second. Directional differences in responses were dependent on repetition rate. Our results support the proposal that a combination of both spectral and temporal acoustic features determines the responses of auditory cortical neurons to sound, and add to the growing body of evidence indicating that the traditional view of the auditory cortex as a frequency analyzer is not sufficient to explain how the mammalian brain represents complex sounds.