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Engaging in an auditory task suppresses responses in auditory cortex

Nature Neuroscience volume 12, pages 646–654 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Although systems that are involved in attentional selection have been studied extensively, much less is known about nonselective systems. To study these preparatory mechanisms, we compared activity in auditory cortex that was elicited by sounds while rats performed an auditory task ('engaged') with activity that was elicited by identical stimuli while subjects were awake but not performing a task ('passive'). We found that engagement suppressed responses, an effect that was opposite in sign to that elicited by selective attention. In the auditory thalamus, however, engagement enhanced spontaneous firing rates but did not affect evoked responses. These results indicate that neural activity in auditory cortex cannot be viewed simply as a limited resource that is allocated in greater measure as the state of the animal passes from somnolent to passively listening to engaged and attentive. Instead, the engaged condition possesses a characteristic and distinct neural signature in which sound-evoked responses are paradoxically suppressed.

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Figure 1: Cortical evoked responses are suppressed in the engaged condition, but spontaneous activity is unchanged.
Figure 2: Decision-relevant target is suppressed in engaged condition.
Figure 3: Evoked auditory responses are not suppressed during an auditory task relative to an olfactory task.
Figure 4: Changes in arousal and anesthesia have distinct neural signatures.
Figure 5: Suppression of evoked responses is not caused by self-triggering of stimulus.
Figure 6: Neural correlate of engagement differs in auditory thalamus.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the US National Institutes of Health, the Swartz Foundation, the Marie Robertson Fund, the Louis Morin Charitable Trust and the Coleman Fung Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA

    Gonzalo H Otazu, Lung-Hao Tai, Yang Yang & Anthony M Zador

  2. Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, USA

    Lung-Hao Tai & Yang Yang

Authors
  1. Gonzalo H Otazu
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  2. Lung-Hao Tai
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  4. Anthony M Zador
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Contributions

G.H.O. and A.M.Z. designed the overall experiments and wrote the manuscript. G.H.O. designed and performed the experiments in Figures 1, 2, 4 and 6. L.-H.T. designed and performed the experiments in Figure 3 (intermodal attention). Y.Y. designed and performed the experiments in Figure 4 (head-fixed behavior).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anthony M Zador.

Supplementary information

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Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Analysis, Supplementary Data and Supplementary Model (PDF 546 kb)

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Otazu, G., Tai, LH., Yang, Y. et al. Engaging in an auditory task suppresses responses in auditory cortex. Nat Neurosci 12, 646–654 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2306

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