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Behavioral Determination of Stimulus Pair Discrimination of Auditory Acoustic and Electrical Stimuli Using a Classical Conditioning and Heart-rate Approach

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Extra-classical tuning predicts stimulus-dependent receptive fields in auditory neurons.

David M Schneider¹, Sarah M N Woolley

¹Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|August 19, 2011

Summary

Auditory neurons in zebra finches exhibit stimulus-dependent receptive fields, influenced by extra-classical receptive fields. This explains how neurons process natural versus artificial sounds.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Auditory Neuroscience
Computational Neuroscience

Background:

Sensory neurons' receptive fields vary with stimulus statistics (e.g., natural vs. artificial stimuli).
Understanding neuronal nonlinearities is key to deciphering stimulus-dependent receptive fields across sensory modalities.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate stimulus-dependent receptive fields in auditory midbrain neurons of the zebra finch.
To determine the role of extra-classical receptive fields in shaping neuronal responses to complex sounds.

Main Methods:

Electrophysiological recordings from auditory midbrain neurons in zebra finches.
Characterization of receptive fields using natural (song) and artificial stimuli.
Computational modeling to simulate neuronal responses and test hypotheses.

Main Results:

Many auditory midbrain neurons possess extra-classical receptive fields with sideband excitation and inhibition.
The characteristics of stimulus-dependent receptive fields correlate with extra-classical tuning properties (presence, valence, asymmetry).
Extra-classical excitation is linked to expanding excitatory bandwidths, while inhibition is linked to static or contracting bandwidths during song processing.

Conclusions:

Extra-classical receptive fields predict the stimulus-dependent nature of receptive fields in auditory neurons.
A common neuronal nonlinearity, involving extra-classical tuning and a static spike threshold, can explain stimulus-dependent receptive fields.
These findings offer a unified mechanism for how auditory neurons process complex sounds with varying statistical properties.