Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortex
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
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Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortexDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.7272/Q6BV7DVM.
Article and author information
Author details
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
© 2022, Morrill et al.
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.
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