Early and late patterns of stimulus-related activity in auditory cortex of trained animals

Epidural electrocorticograms over the right auditory cortex (field AI) were measured using implanted 18-channel (3 x 6) electrode arrays in four animals (Mongolian gerbil) trained to discriminate between a rising and a falling frequency modulated tone (frequency range 2-4 kHz). Using a previously introduced classification procedure, transient patterns of cortical activity suitable to discriminate between the rising and the falling modulation were identified. Early (locked to stimulus onset) and late (emerging at variable times poststimulus) patterns could be differentiated. Deletion of increasing numbers of randomly selected electrodes was used to determine a critical density of recording channels required to capture the discriminative power of the early and late patterns. Statistical analysis of the classification revealed a sigmoid dependence of the discriminative power from the number of remaining electrodes with an inflection point at 12 electrodes. The analysis of the minima of the classification statistic revealed that in the early patterns discriminative information was focal on regions corresponding to the tonotopic representation of the stimuli, whereas in late patterns this information seemed to be distributed nonfocally across larger cortical regions. This analysis supports the previous notion of the coexistence of topographically organized activity states related to the physical stimulus features and nontopographically organized states determined largely by intrinsic factors (Ohl et al. 2001).