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Early experience impairs perceptual discrimination

Abstract

Sensory experience can reorganize cortical sensory representations in an epoch of early development. During this period, cortical sensory neurons may shift their response selectivity and become tuned to more frequently occurring stimuli. Although this enlarged cortical representation is believed to underlie improved sensory processing of the experienced stimuli, its precise perceptual consequences are still unknown. We show that rearing rats in a single-frequency tonal environment results in enlarged cortical representations of the frequencies near that of the experienced tone, but the animals are impaired in perceptual discrimination of the over-represented frequencies. By contrast, discrimination of the neighboring under-represented frequencies is substantially improved. Computational analysis indicated that the altered perceptual ability could be fully accounted for by the sound exposure–induced reorganization of cortical primary auditory representations. These results indicate that early experience shapes sensory perception. The same plasticity processes may be important in optimizing phonemic representations in humans.

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Figure 1: Tonal frequency discrimination.
Figure 2: Enlarged representations of the experienced frequency.
Figure 3: Tone exposure–induced effects.
Figure 4: Reduced information to decode over-represented frequencies.
Figure 5: Modeling the frequency representations in the primary auditory cortex.
Figure 6: Frequency-discrimination performances of the model primary auditory cortex.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Polley for comments on the manuscript and D. Blake for discussions. The work was supported by a grant from US National Institutes of Health.

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Contributions

Y.K.H. analyzed the perceptual behaviors, mapped the auditory cortex and conducted the modeling studies. H.K., M.N.I. and J.H.S. mapped the auditory cortex of the experimental and control animals and analyzed the mapping results. S.B. supervised the project and drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the experimental design, discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shaowen Bao.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Han, Y., Köver, H., Insanally, M. et al. Early experience impairs perceptual discrimination. Nat Neurosci 10, 1191–1197 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1941

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