Article
Neurosciences
Ji Liu, Patrick O. Kanold
Summary: The study reveals that the excitatory neurons in the primary auditory cortex show frequency preferences, while inhibitory neurons have more consistent frequency preferences. Sideband inhibition has higher local heterogeneity than frequency tuning, indicating that it originates from diverse sources of neurons. Different neuron types exhibit variation in sideband inhibition, affecting two-tone interactions and spectral integration differently.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Review
Behavioral Sciences
Florian Studer, Tania Rinaldi Barkat
Summary: This review discusses the specific contributions of inhibitory neurons in the auditory cortex to sound processing and integration, examining the intrinsic properties of inhibitory interneurons and how inhibition shapes auditory cortex responsiveness to sound. It also explores the role of inhibitory interneurons in sound sensation and perception, highlighting the crucial role they play in integrating information and open questions for further understanding the complexity of auditory perception.
NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Destinee A. Aponte, Gregory Handy, Amber M. Kline, Hiroaki Tsukano, Brent Doiron, Hiroyuki K. Kato
Summary: The study found that the direction selectivity of frequency modulation is not due to temporal offsets, but to an asymmetry in total synaptic charge between preferred and non-preferred directions. Inactivation of cortical somatostatin-expressing interneurons was shown to play a role in this process. Theoretical models suggest that charge asymmetry arises from the broad spatial topography of inhibitory neurons.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Kuzma Strelnikov, Mario Hervault, Lidwine Laurent, Pascal Barone
Summary: Research has shown that action inhibition efficiency is poorer in the audiovisual modality compared to visual and auditory modalities. In high-level decisional conflict, bimodal stimulation is not processed as a simple multisensory object improving performance, but as concurrent visual and auditory information, increasing task demands and impairing the ability to revise responses.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Amber M. Kline, Destinee A. Aponte, Hiroyuki K. Kato
Summary: Animals sense sounds through neural pathways that reach higher-order cortices to extract complex acoustic features. This study used two-photon calcium imaging and two-tone stimuli to compare spectrotemporal integration between primary and secondary auditory cortices in mice. The results showed distinct roles of the two cortices in encoding complex auditory features, potentially suggesting parallel information extraction between these regions.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Cameron P. Casey, Sean Tanabe, Zahra Farahbakhsh, Margaret Parker, Amber Bo, Marissa White, Tyler Ballweg, Andrew Mcintosh, William Filbey, Matthew I. Banks, Yuri B. Saalmann, Robert A. Pearce, Robert D. Sanders
Summary: This study investigated the neural correlates of sensory awareness during consciousness and disconnected consciousness using dexmedetomidine as a sedative. The findings suggest that during disconnected consciousness, there is a disruption of normal predictive coding processes, resulting in all incoming auditory stimuli becoming similarly surprising.
Article
Neurosciences
Dongting Tian, Shin-Ichi Izumi
Summary: Results of this study suggest that 20Hz rTMS induces a reliable interhemispheric facilitatory effect, with a significant increase in single-pulse MEP and paired-pulse intracortical facilitation (ICF) in the non-stimulated hemisphere after rTMS intervention. Intracortical inhibition in the unstimulated hemisphere also increased following rTMS.
Article
Neurosciences
Elena K. Rotondo, Kasia M. Bieszczad
Summary: The study reveals that the inhibitor of histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3-i) facilitates changes in auditory cortical tuning and subcortical peak amplitude, enabling cue-specific extinction behavior. Sensory neuroplasticity plays a crucial role in encoding specific sensory features of learning experiences.
BRAIN RESEARCH BULLETIN
(2021)
Article
Acoustics
Christopher Conroy, Andrew J. Byrne, Gerald Kidd
Summary: Recent research suggests the presence of specialized mechanisms in the auditory system for coding spectrotemporal modulations (STMs), tuned to different combinations of spectral modulation frequency, temporal modulation frequency, and STM sweep direction. This study used a psychophysical forward masking paradigm to investigate evidence of such mechanisms. The findings support the existence of an STM-specific coding mechanism with sweep-direction selectivity, as reflected in the detectability of the target.
JOURNAL OF THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
John C. Middlebrooks
Summary: This story is about the search for a cortical map of auditory space, which has not been found after 40 years of research. Instead, researchers have discovered the dynamic spatial properties of cortical neurons.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Cell Biology
Joonyeup Lee, Gideon Rothschild
Summary: The study revealed that in the auditory cortex of behaving mice, Off-responses encode preceding sound sequences and learning to associate a sound sequence with a reward enhances Off-responses. Learning also improves the network-level discriminability of sound sequences by Off-responses.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Andris Cerins, Daniel Corp, George Opie, Michael Do, Bridgette Speranza, Jason He, Pamela Barhoun, Ian Fuelscher, Peter Enticott, Christian Hyde
Summary: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is used to investigate neurobiological dysfunctions in neurological disorders. Short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI) is a promising biomarker but its variability can be influenced by inter-individual differences in excitatory neural populations activated by TMS.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Laura Benhaim-Sitbon, Maria Lev, Uri Polat
Summary: Heterophoria is a common disorder that affects binocular fusion and can lead to misalignment of the eyes and reading difficulties. Recent studies have found abnormal patterns of low-level visual processing in individuals with heterophoria, resulting in larger perceptive fields (PF). The size of the PF is closely related to masking and crowding. This study explored the impact of heterophoria on PF size, foveal crowding, and letter identification. The results showed that heterophoric individuals had larger horizontal PF size, stronger crowding, and an extended crowding zone, which required more processing effort. The study also found a correlation between the crowding zone, PF size, and the severity of heterophoria. These findings could explain the variability in masking literature and reading difficulties in individuals with high heterophoria.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting, Andrew James Thomas Stevenson, Ulf Ziemann
Summary: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to study the excitability of corticospinal neurons in the hand versus leg representation of the human motor cortex. The results showed that regulation of excitability through GABAAergic and glutamatergic interneuronal circuitry is highly similar in both representations, and that both representations are activated in largely identical ways by TMS.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Stuart D. Washington, Dominique L. Pritchett, Georgios A. Keliris, Jagmeet S. Kanwal
Summary: The mustached bat is a model for researching cortical hemispheric asymmetry in mammals, with its complex social vocalizations processed preferentially in the left primary auditory cortex. Hemispheric specializations differ between males and females, with males having a stronger asymmetry related to spectrotemporal processing based on selectivities to frequency modulations.
