Cell Reports
Volume 29, Issue 7, 12 November 2019, Pages 2041-2053.e4
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Article
White Noise Background Improves Tone Discrimination by Suppressing Cortical Tuning Curves

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.10.049Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Background white noise suppresses tuning curves of auditory cortical neurons

  • Background white noise increases the discriminability of spectrally similar tones

  • PV+ activation confirms the involvement of the cortex in the improved discriminability

  • A population model links cortical activity suppression with behavioral improvement

Summary

The brain faces the difficult task of maintaining a stable representation of key features of the outside world in noisy sensory surroundings. How does the sensory representation change with noise, and how does the brain make sense of it? We investigated the effect of background white noise (WN) on tuning properties of neurons in mouse A1 and its impact on discrimination performance in a go/no-go task. We find that WN suppresses the activity of A1 neurons, which surprisingly increases the discriminability of tones spectrally close to each other. To confirm the involvement of A1, we optogenetically excited parvalbumin-positive (PV+) neurons in A1, which have similar effects as WN on both tuning properties and frequency discrimination. A population model suggests that the suppression of A1 tuning curves increases frequency selectivity and thereby improves discrimination. Our findings demonstrate that the cortical representation of pure tones adapts during noise to improve sensory acuity.

Keywords

auditory cortex
sensory-driven behavior
background noise
optogenetics
parvalbumin interneurons
awake electrophysiological recordings
decision making
sensory processing
population coding

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Present address: Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom

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