Neural mechanisms of discrimination of natural sounds learned by guinea pigs in the competition-based training

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The current study is to illustrate changes in global activation pattern after conditioning to a natural sound (footstep, F sound). Our assumption is that behavioral achievement would be linked to changes in cortical network. This was revealed in the voltage sensitive dye optical imaging. Competitive training, in which multiple animals were trained together, facilitated animals to reach reward earlier than competitors. Imaging results showed that obvious differences in cortical activation have not been found between naive and trained animals with F sound. The time-reversed F sound, which is spectrally the same as but temporally reversed from F sound, resulted in reduced peak activation, both in naive and trained animals, but in much more reduction in trained animals. These results suggest that the cortical network which may have been dominantly tuned to F sound suppresses activation by its temporally-modified version more efficiently than the corresponding naive network.