title: Spectral features control temporal plasticity in auditory cortex.
abstract: Cortical responses are adjusted and optimized throughout life to meet changing behavioral demands and to compensate for peripheral damage. The cholinergic nucleus basalis (NB) gates cortical plasticity and focuses learning on behaviorally meaningful stimuli. By systematically varying the acoustic parameters of the sound paired with NB activation, we have previously shown that tone frequency and amplitude modulation rate alter the topography and selectivity of frequency tuning in primary auditory cortex. This result suggests that network-level rules operate in the cortex to guide reorganization based on specific features of the sensory input associated with NB activity. This report summarizes recent evidence that temporal response properties of cortical neurons are influenced by the spectral characteristics of sounds associated with cholinergic modulation. For example, repeated pairing of a spectrally complex (ripple) stimulus decreased the minimum response latency for the ripple, but lengthened the minimum latency for tones. Pairing a rapid train of tones with NB activation only increased the maximum following rate of cortical neurons when the carrier frequency of each train was randomly varied. These results suggest that spectral and temporal parameters of acoustic experiences interact to shape spectrotemporal selectivity in the cortex. Additional experiments with more complex stimuli are needed to clarify how the cortex learns natural sounds such as speech.
authors.affiliation: Cortical Plasticity Laboratory, Cognition and Neuroscience Program, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083, USA. kilgard@utdallas.edu
authors.forename: M P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Kilgard
authors.forename: P K
authors.initials: PK
authors.lastname: Pandya
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Vazquez
authors.forename: D L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Rathbun
authors.forename: N D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Engineer
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Moucha
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002799:Cholinergic Fibers / Q000502:physiology; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*; D010507:Periodicity; D016548:Prosencephalon / Q000502:physiology; D051381:Rats; D013997:Time Factors