Composite receptive fields in the mouse auditory cortex
Composite receptive fields in the mouse auditory cortex
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DOI：
10.1113/jp285003
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发表时间：
2021-10
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Sihao Lu;Mark A. Steadman;G. W. Y. Ang;A. S. Kozlov
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作者：
Sihao Lu;Mark A. Steadman;G. W. Y. Ang;A. S. Kozlov
感觉神经科学的一个核心问题是神经元如何代表复杂的自然刺激。这个过程涉及多个特征提取步骤，以获得对分类和行为有用的浓缩的分类表示。以前已经表明，中央听觉神经元在椋鸟复合感受野组成的多个功能时，探测同种歌曲。然而，这种特性是鸣禽的一种特质特征，一群高度专业化的声乐学习者，还是不同动物中枢听觉系统的一种共性特征，目前尚不清楚。为了解决这个问题，我们记录了小鼠听觉皮层神经元的反应，并使用小鼠超声发声（USVs）作为自然和行为学相关的刺激和音高转移八哥歌曲作为自然但行为学无关的控制刺激来表征其感受野。我们发现，小鼠听皮层神经元具有复合感受野，其中包含多种兴奋性和抑制性亚单位。此外，无论是同种或异种发声的情况下。然后，我们在这两类自然刺激上训练稀疏滤波算法，以获得统计上最优的特征，并使用UMAP（一种以前用于分析小鼠USV和鸟鸣的降维算法）比较自然和人工特征。我们已经发现，接收场的功能与鼠标USVs和那些获得的音高转移椋鸟歌曲聚集在一起，稀疏过滤功能。然而，自然和人工感受场特征大多单独聚类。这些结果表明，复合感受野可能是不同类别动物中枢听觉系统的一种共性。他们进一步表明，小鼠听觉皮层神经元的二次感受场特征是自然刺激不变的。
A central question in sensory neuroscience is how neurons represent complex natural stimuli. This process involves multiple steps of feature extraction to obtain a condensed, categorical representation useful for classification and behavior. It has previously been shown that central auditory neurons in the starling have composite receptive fields composed of multiple features when probed with conspecific songs. Whether this property is an idiosyncratic characteristic of songbirds, a group of highly specialized vocal learners, or a generic characteristic of central auditory systems in different animals is, however, unknown. To address this question, we have recorded responses from auditory cortical neurons in mice, and characterized their receptive fields using mouse ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) as a natural and ethologically relevant stimulus and pitch-shifted starling songs as a natural but ethologically irrelevant control stimulus. We have found that auditory cortical neurons in the mouse display composite receptive fields with multiple excitatory and inhibitory subunits. Moreover, this was the case with either the conspecific or the heterospecific vocalizations. We then trained the sparse filtering algorithm on both classes of natural stimuli to obtain statistically optimal features, and compared the natural and artificial features using UMAP, a dimensionality-reduction algorithm previously used to analyze mouse USVs and birdsongs. We have found that the receptive-field features obtained with the mouse USVs and those obtained with the pitch-shifted starling songs clustered together, as did the sparse-filtering features. However, the natural and artificial receptive-field features clustered mostly separately. These results indicate that composite receptive fields are likely a generic property of central auditory systems in different classes of animals. They further suggest that the quadratic receptive-field features of the mouse auditory cortical neurons are natural-stimulus invariant.