Temporal processing in the primate auditory cortex

                                Dr. Thomas (Tom) Lu

 

The issue of how time-varying sounds are represented by the auditory

cortex is fundamental to understanding how the central auditory

system processes complex sounds such as speech. Because prior

electrophysiological studies indicate that the stimulus-locking

ability of auditory cortical neurons is limited, the question remains

as to how the auditory cortex represents temporal features to which

it cannot entrain. One of the steps we have taken towards addressing

this issue has been to record neural activity from an awake primate.

We measured how well auditory cortical neurons can follow a rapid

train of clicks as well as other temporally modulated stimuli. The

results of our experiments suggest that while slowly occurring

sequences of stimulus events are explicitly represented by a temporal

code, rapidly occurring stimulus features can be implicitly

represented by rate codes.

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