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White Noise Background Improves Tone Discrimination by Suppressing Cortical Tuning Curves.
Journal article

White Noise Background Improves Tone Discrimination by Suppressing Cortical Tuning Curves.

  • Christensen RK Department of Biomedicine, Basel University, 4056 Basel, Switzerland; Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Lindén H Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen, 2200 Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Nakamura M Department of Biomedicine, Basel University, 4056 Basel, Switzerland.
  • Barkat TR Department of Biomedicine, Basel University, 4056 Basel, Switzerland. Electronic address: tania.barkat@unibas.ch.
  • 2019-11-14
Published in:
  • Cell reports. - 2019
auditory cortex
awake electrophysiological recordings
background noise
decision making
optogenetics
parvalbumin interneurons
population coding
sensory processing
sensory-driven behavior
Acoustic Stimulation
Animals
Auditory Cortex
Auditory Perception
Cell Line
Evoked Potentials, Auditory
Mice
Neurons
Noise
English The brain faces the difficult task of maintaining a stable representation of key features of the outside world in noisy sensory surroundings. How does the sensory representation change with noise, and how does the brain make sense of it? We investigated the effect of background white noise (WN) on tuning properties of neurons in mouse A1 and its impact on discrimination performance in a go/no-go task. We find that WN suppresses the activity of A1 neurons, which surprisingly increases the discriminability of tones spectrally close to each other. To confirm the involvement of A1, we optogenetically excited parvalbumin-positive (PV+) neurons in A1, which have similar effects as WN on both tuning properties and frequency discrimination. A population model suggests that the suppression of A1 tuning curves increases frequency selectivity and thereby improves discrimination. Our findings demonstrate that the cortical representation of pure tones adapts during noise to improve sensory acuity.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/92748
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