Auditory cortex is required for fear potentiation of gap detection.
Auditory cortex is necessary for the perceptual detection of brief gaps in noise, but is not necessary for many other auditory tasks such as frequency discrimination, prepulse inhibition of startle responses, or fear conditioning with pure tones. It remains unclear why auditory cortex should be necessary for some auditory tasks but not others. One possibility is that auditory cortex is causally involved in gap detection and other forms of temporal processing in order to associate meaning with temporally structured sounds. This predicts that auditory cortex should be necessary for associating meaning with gaps. To test this prediction, we developed a fear conditioning paradigm for mice based on gap detection. We found that pairing a 10 or 100 ms gap with an aversive stimulus caused a robust enhancement of gap detection measured 6 h later, which we refer to as fear potentiation of gap detection. Optogenetic suppression of auditory cortex during pairing abolished this fear potentiation, indicating that auditory cortex is critically involved in associating temporally structured sounds with emotionally salient events.
Institute of Neuroscience.
Aldis P
AP
Weible
Department of Psychology, and Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403.
Christine
C
Liu
Institute of Neuroscience, Department of Biology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403.
Cristopher M
CM
Niell
Institute of Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, and wehr@uoregon.edu.
Michael
M
Wehr
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000818:Animals; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008822:Mice, Transgenic; D009433:Neural Inhibition / Q000502:physiology; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D062308:Optogenetics; D013997:Time Factors
Auditory cortex; fear conditioning; gap detection; optogenetics