Sensory Representations in the Auditory Cortex and Thalamus

Abstract

Abstract What are the similarities and differences between sensory representations in the auditory cortex and thalamus—and what do they imply about thalamocortical transformations in the auditory system? This chapter reviews studies that have addressed these questions by comparing auditory cortical and thalamic sound representations at the single-neuron and neuronal-population levels. The studies have used a diversity of stimulus sets and approaches: simple sounds to evaluate frequency tuning and modulation sensitivity; complex artificial sounds to estimate spectrotemporal receptive fields and nonlinear response functions; sound sequences to measure effects of stimulus probability and patterning; and natural sounds to examine responses to ecologically relevant vocalizations and ambient noise. However, key findings converge to the conclusion that, like auditory brainstem nuclei and midbrain structures, the auditory thalamus and cortex are specialized for analysis of temporal information in sensory signals over multiple timescales.