Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortex

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Abstract

In everyday behavior, sensory systems are in constant competition for attentional resources, but the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms of modality-selective attention remain largely uninvestigated. We conducted translaminar recordings in mouse auditory cortex (AC) during an audiovisual (AV) attention shifting task. Attending to sound elements in an AV stream reduced both pre-stimulus and stimulus-evoked spiking activity, primarily in deep layer neurons and neurons without spectrotemporal tuning. Despite reduced spiking, stimulus decoder accuracy was preserved, suggesting improved sound encoding efficiency. Similarly, task-irrelevant mapping stimuli during intertrial intervals evoked fewer spikes without impairing stimulus encoding, indicating that attentional modulation generalized beyond training stimuli. Importantly, spiking reductions predicted trial-to-trial behavioral accuracy during auditory attention, but not visual attention. Together, these findings suggest auditory attention facilitates sound discrimination by filtering sound-irrelevant background activity in AC, and that the deepest cortical layers serve as a hub for integrating extramodal contextual information.

Data availability

Physiology and behavior data supporting all figures in this manuscript have been submitted to Dryad with DOI: 10.7272/Q6BV7DVM

The following data sets were generated

1. Morrill RJ
(2022) Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortex
Dryad Digital Repository, doi:10.7272/Q6BV7DVM.

https://dx.doi.org/10.7272/Q6BV7DVM

Article and author information

Author details

Ryan James Morrill

Coleman Memorial Laboratory, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8592-4549
James Bigelow

Coleman Memorial Laboratory, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Jefferson DeKloe

Coleman Memorial Laboratory, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Andrea R Hasenstaub

oleman Memorial Laboratory, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States

For correspondence
andrea.hasenstaub@ucsf.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3998-5073

Funding

National Institutes of Health (R01NS116598)

Andrea R Hasenstaub

National Institutes of Health (R01DC014101)

Andrea R Hasenstaub

National Science Foundation (GFRP)

Ryan James Morrill

Hearing Research Incorporated

Andrea R Hasenstaub

Klingenstein Foundation

Andrea R Hasenstaub

Coleman Memorial Fund

Andrea R Hasenstaub

National Institutes of Health (F32DC016846)

James Bigelow

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All experiments were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at the University of California, San Francisco.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.