Behavioral modulation of neural encoding of click-trains in the primary and nonprimary auditory cortex of cats

Neural representation of acoustic stimuli in the mammal auditory cortex (AC) has been extensively studied using anesthetized or awake nonbehaving animals. Recently, several studies have shown that active engagement in an auditory behavioral task can substantially change the neuron response properties compared with when animals were passively listening to the same sounds; however, these studies mainly investigated the effect of behavioral state on the primary auditory cortex and the reported effects were inconsistent. Here, we examined the single-unit spike activities in both the primary and nonprimary areas along the dorsal-to-ventral direction of the cat's AC, when the cat was actively discriminating click-trains at different repetition rates and when it was passively listening to the same stimuli. We found that the changes due to task engagement were heterogeneous in the primary AC; some neurons showed significant increases in driven firing rate, others showed decreases. But in the nonprimary AC, task engagement predominantly enhanced the neural responses, resulting in a substantial improvement of the neural discriminability of click-trains. Additionally, our results revealed that neural responses synchronizing to click-trains gradually decreased along the dorsal-to-ventral direction of cat AC, while nonsynchronizing responses remained less changed. The present study provides new insights into the hierarchical organization of AC along the dorsal-to-ventral direction and highlights the importance of using behavioral animals to investigate the later stages of cortical processing.