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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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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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).
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2306
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