• Pei-Run Song, Yu-Ying Zhai, Yu-Mei Gong, Xin-Yu Du, Jie He, Qi-Chen Zhang, and Xiongjie Yu.
• Department of Neurology of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China; Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, Zhejiang University, China.
• Neuroscience. 2021 Feb 10; 455: 79-88.

AbstractThe rat auditory cortex is divided anatomically into several areas, but little is known about the functional differences in information processing among these areas. Three tonotopically organized core fields, namely, the primary (A1), anterior (AAF), and ventral (VAF) auditory fields, as well as one non-tonotopically organized belt field, the dorsal belt (DB), were identified based on their response properties. Compared to neurons in A1, AAF and VAF, units in the DB exhibited little or no response to pure tones but strong responses to white noise. The few DB neurons responded to pure tones with thresholds greater than 60 dB SPL, which was significantly higher than the thresholds of neurons in the core regions. In response to white noise, units in DB showed significantly longer latency and lower peak response, as well as longer response duration, than those in the core regions. Responses to repeated white noise were also examined. In contrast to neurons in A1, AAF and VAF, DB neurons could not follow repeated stimulation at a 300 ms inter-stimulus interval (ISI) and showed a significant steeper ISI tuning curve slope when the ISI was increased from 300 ms to 4.8 s. These results indicate that the DB processes auditory information on broader spectral and longer temporal scales than the core regions, reflecting a distinct role in the hierarchical cortical pathway.Copyright © 2020 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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