Perception fundamentally relies on the brain’s ability to extract structure from its sensory environment. The auditory cortex possesses significant sensitivity to statistical regularities in tone sequences. To examine this phenomenon at the single-neuron level, we used multitone sequences and recorded responses from the auditory cortex of awake adult female Sprague Dawley rats.
Tones were presented in periodic sequences with a fixed, repeated cycle; in a fully random condition; or in an intermediate condition in which cycles were maintained, but tones were randomly permuted within each cycle (random cycle condition). Units showed a continuum of preferences between order-preferring neurons and randomness-preferring neurons. Unexpectedly, we found sensitivity to the position of sounds in the cycle (‘phase modulation’).
The strongest and most consistent phase modulations were in the responses to the random cycle condition. Finally, we show how such phase sensitivity may emerge from a simple, biologically plausible computation. This study did not generate new unique reagents.
We thank Ana Polterovich for her help in setting up the experimental system, Mousa Karayanni for his help with the experimental system and preprocessing, and all the lab members for being good and supportive friends. This research was supported by grant 1126/18 of the Israel Science Foundation, grant 2016688 of the NSF-BSF-NIH Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program, and ERC Advanced Grant 340063 (project RATLAND). Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Sapir Bashari, Maciej M.
Jankowski & Israel Nelken Department of Animal and Human Physiology, Faculty of Biology, University of Gdańsk, Gdansk, Poland Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.
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