title: Temporal coherence structure rapidly shapes neuronal interactions.
abstract: Perception of segregated sources is essential in navigating cluttered acoustic environments. A basic mechanism to implement this process is the temporal coherence principle. It postulates that a signal is perceived as emitted from a single source only when all of its features are temporally modulated coherently, causing them to bind perceptually. Here we report on neural correlates of this process as rapidly reshaped interactions in primary auditory cortex, measured in three different ways: as changes in response rates, as adaptations of spectrotemporal receptive fields following stimulation by temporally coherent and incoherent tone sequences, and as changes in spiking correlations during the tone sequences. Responses, sensitivity and presumed connectivity were rapidly enhanced by synchronous stimuli, and suppressed by alternating (asynchronous) sounds, but only when the animals engaged in task performance and were attentive to the stimuli. Temporal coherence and attention are therefore both important factors in auditory scene analysis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Yanbo
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Pingbo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Yin
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Oxenham
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Jonathan B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Fritz
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.|Department of Cognitive Studies, École Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Shihab A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Shamma
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000200:Action Potentials; D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005260:Female; D005289:Ferrets; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis