I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are Thy works;
Psalm 139:14
"Every day, we make countless decisions based on sounds without a second thought. But what exactly happens in the brain during such instances?
A new study from the Renart Lab, published in Current Biology, takes a look under the hood.
The cortex is divided into regions that handle different functions: sensory areas process information from our environment, while motor areas manage our actions.
The cortex is divided into regions that handle different functions: sensory areas process information from our environment, while motor areas manage our actions.
Surprisingly, signals related to future actions, which one might expect to find only in motor areas, also appear in sensory ones.
Q: What are movement-related signals doing in regions dedicated to sensory processing?
"We found that sensory- and choice-related signals displayed distinct spatial and temporal patterns," Renart continues.
"Signals related to sound detection appeared quickly but faded fast, vanishing around 400 milliseconds after the sound was presented, and were distributed broadly across all cortical layers. In contrast, choice-related signals, which indicate the movement the mouse is about to make, emerged later, before the decision was executed, and were concentrated in the cortex's deeper layers."
However, despite the temporal separation between stimulus and choice activity, further analysis revealed an intriguing connection: neurons that responded to a specific sound frequency also tended to be more active for the actions associated with those sounds.
As Steinfeld explains, "For instance, a neuron that reacts to high frequencies might activate more for a rightward lick in one mouse and a leftward lick in another, depending on how each was trained, since we switched the sound-action contingency. This variability across different animals shows that the activity isn't hardwired but adapts through experience. These neurons learn to increase their activity for whatever action is appropriate based on their preferred sound frequency."
Q: What are movement-related signals doing in regions dedicated to sensory processing?
"We found that sensory- and choice-related signals displayed distinct spatial and temporal patterns," Renart continues.
However, despite the temporal separation between stimulus and choice activity, further analysis revealed an intriguing connection: neurons that responded to a specific sound frequency also tended to be more active for the actions associated with those sounds.
As Steinfeld explains, "For instance, a neuron that reacts to high frequencies might activate more for a rightward lick in one mouse and a leftward lick in another, depending on how each was trained, since we switched the sound-action contingency. This variability across different animals shows that the activity isn't hardwired but adapts through experience. These neurons learn to increase their activity for whatever action is appropriate based on their preferred sound frequency."
MedicalXpress