Neuronal population correlate of asymmetric auditory perception in mice - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2014

Neuronal population correlate of asymmetric auditory perception in mice

Résumé

Natural sounds display strong intensity ?uctuations over time. However, we currently understand better auditory processing in the frequency domain than in the temporal domain. Recently, auditory psychophysics showed that humans perceive a sound whose intensity increases as louder than a sound whose intensity decreases over time, although the overall intensity of the sounds are the same. The underlying neuronal mechanisms of this striking perceptual asymmetry are still elusive. To test if the direction of intensity variation is asymmetrically processed by the auditory system, we have recorded the activity of large populations of neurons in the auditory cortex of awake mice while playing sounds of ramping-up and ramping-down intensities with various durations. We observed that long ramps (> 250ms) produce complex cortical population dynamics with different sets of neurons ?ring at the beginning compared to the end of the ramps. This indicates that the coding of intensity variations coding is strongly distributed in the auditory cortex. More interestingly, we observed that population ?ring rate is overall larger for increasing ramps than for decreasing ramps, suggesting that, also for mice, sounds ramping up could be perceptually more salient than sounds ramping down. To test this hypothesis, we performed behavioral experiments in which the saliency of a sound is measured through associative learning speed. We observed that increasing ramps are more rapidly associated to a correct behavior than decreasing ramps, showing that increasing sound intensities are more salient than decreasing sound intensities for mice. Altogether, these novel observations indicate that strongly non-linear processes in the auditory system shape both the perception and the cortical representation of time-varying sounds, to eventually reinforce rising and thus potentially approaching sound sources.

Mots clés

NA
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-01107135 , version 1 (20-01-2015)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01107135 , version 1

Citer

Brice Bathellier, Thomas Deneux, Louise François, Suncana Sikiric, Emmanuel Ponsot. Neuronal population correlate of asymmetric auditory perception in mice. Fifth Annual Meeting of the GDR Multielectrodes, Oct 2014, Gif sur Yvette, France. ⟨hal-01107135⟩
108 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More