Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 146, Issue 1, 26 October 1992, Pages 37-40
Neuroscience Letters

Spatio-temporal pattern of frequency representation in the auditory cortex of guinea pigs

https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3940(92)90166-5Get rights and content

Abstract

The spatio-temporal pattern of sound-evoked neural activity in the guinea pig auditory cortex was studied by optical recording with the aid of voltage-sensitive dye. Changes in light intensity induced by sounds at various frequencies and pressure levels were recorded with a 12×12 array o photodiodes. The amplitudes of the responses were displayed as sequential two-dimensional images. Tonotopical organization was found in two subdivisions of the auditory cortex, the anterior field (field A) and the dorsocaudal field (field DC). The frequency gradients in fields A and DC had a mirror-image relationship. This agrees with results obtained by the microelectrode technique. However, the tonotopic response observed in our study was transient. The focal activity that began in field A propagated in two directions; dorsally along the iso-frequency bands in field A, and caudally toward field DC. This suggests that the sound information processing initiates at field A, and its outputs are transferred to field DC, which is probably a hierarchically higher center.

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    We focused on the activity in A1 because the earliest response to a pure tone appeared in A1 in guinea pigs (Wallace et al., 1999; Nishimura et al., 2007), indicating that A1 is the cortical area that first receives the ascending auditory inputs from the thalamus. Similar to the topographic changes of responses with tone frequencies (called tonotopy) in A1 (Redies et al., 1989; Taniguchi et al., 1992; Wallace et al., 2000; Horikawa et al., 2001; Song et al., 2006; Nishimura et al., 2007; Nishimura and Song, 2014), the initiating location in responses to BN-1k (for the definition of initiating location, see Section “Analysis of initiating location” in Experimental procedures) was located at a more rostral location in A1 compared to that in responses to BN-16k (Fig. 1C, cross; the recording field is depicted as a box in Fig. 1A). Although the response onset-times at the initiating locations changed with different sound intensities (Fig. 1D), there was no obvious change in coordinates of the initiating location for the same BN (Fig. 1C, arrows; 70 dB vs. 30 dB) (for statistics, see Fig. S4).

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