Nonuniform impacts of forward suppression on neural responses to preferred stimuli and nonpreferred stimuli in the rat auditory cortex

• DOI: 10.1111/ejn.13943
• Publication Date: 2018-05-15T05:55:04Z
• Authors: Fei Gao; Liang Chen; Jiping Zhang
• Keywords: QUIET; Auditory stimuli

Abstract In natural conditions, human and animals need to extract target sound information from noisy acoustic environments for communication survival. However, how the contextual environmental sounds impact tuning of central auditory neurons source azimuth over a wide range levels is not fully understood. Here, we determined azimuth‐level response areas ( ALRA s) rat cortex by recording their responses probe tones varying with azimuths under both quiet (probe alone) forward masking conditions (preceding noise + probe). quiet, cortical responded stronger preferred stimuli than nonpreferred stimuli. an effective preceding reduced extents s suppressed neural across decreasing strength lengthening first‐spike latency. The suppressive effect on was increased increasing masker level decreased prolonging time interval between probe. For portion studied, effects suppression weaker those stimuli, recovery earlier that We suggest this nonuniform important maintain relative stable preferences in environments.