Analysis of evoked and emergent patterns of stimulus-related auditory cortical activity

Cortical activity contains both evoked patterns and emergent patterns of stimulus-related activity. Here we compared evoked and emergent patterns in the primary auditory cortex, field AI, of the gerbil by studying the differential effects of diluting spatial information about the patterns on their geometric dissimilarity by randomly removing channels from the recording data. This identified the sets of most relevant channels for the discrimination of stimuli in both types of patterns. In the evoked patterns the sets of most discriminative channels were found to be focally organized at locations corresponding to the thalamically relayed input into the cortical tonotopic map. In the emergent patterns the sets of most discriminative channels were broadly distributed and held no apparent relationship to the tonotopic map. The results indicate the coexistence in the same neuronal tissue of a topographic mapping principle for the evoked activity and a holographic mapping principle for the emergent activity.