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Updated: Dec 27, 2025

Combined Shuttle-Box Training with Electrophysiological Cortex Recording and Stimulation as a Tool to Study Perception and Learning
Published on: October 22, 2015
Stimulus dependent transformations between synaptic and spiking receptive fields in auditory cortex
Kyunghee X Kim1, Craig A Atencio2, Christoph E Schreiner2,3
1Coleman Memorial Laboratory, Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, USA. Kyunghee.Kim@ucsf.edu.
Abstract:
Auditory cortex neurons nonlinearly integrate synaptic inputs from the thalamus and cortex, and generate spiking outputs for simple and complex sounds. Directly comparing synaptic and spiking activity can determine whether this input-output transformation is stimulus-dependent. We employ in vivo whole-cell recordings in the mouse primary auditory cortex, using pure tones and broadband dynamic moving ripple stimuli, to examine properties of functional integration in tonal (TRFs) and spectrotemporal (STRFs) receptive fields. Spectral tuning in STRFs derived from synaptic, subthreshold and spiking responses proves to be substantially more selective than for TRFs. We describe diverse spectral and temporal modulation preferences and distinct nonlinearities, and their modifications between the input and output stages of neural processing. These results characterize specific processing differences at the level of synaptic convergence, integration and spike generation resulting in stimulus-dependent transformation patterns in the primary auditory cortex.
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