title: Tuning to natural stimulus dynamics in primary auditory cortex.
abstract: The amplitude and pitch fluctuations of natural soundscapes often exhibit "1/f spectra", which means that large, abrupt changes in pitch or loudness occur proportionally less frequently in nature than gentle, gradual fluctuations. Furthermore, human listeners reportedly prefer 1/f distributed random melodies to melodies with faster (1/f0) or slower (1/f2) dynamics. One might therefore suspect that neurons in the central auditory system may be tuned to 1/f dynamics, particularly given that recent reports provide evidence for tuning to 1/f dynamics in primary visual cortex. To test whether neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) are tuned to 1/f dynamics, we recorded responses to random tone complexes in which the fundamental frequency and the envelope were determined by statistically independent "1/f(gamma) random walks," with gamma set to values between 0.5 and 4. Many A1 neurons showed clear evidence of tuning and responded with higher firing rates to stimuli with gamma between 1 and 1.5. Response patterns elicited by 1/f(gamma) stimuli were more reproducible for values of gamma close to 1. These findings indicate that auditory cortex is indeed tuned to the 1/f dynamics commonly found in the statistical distributions of natural soundscapes.
authors.affiliation: University Laboratory of Physiology, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PT, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Garcia-Lazaro
authors.forename: Bashir
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ahmed
authors.forename: J W H
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Schnupp
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005289:Ferrets; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013016:Sound; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013269:Stochastic Processes