TY  - JOUR
A1  - Beetz, Marcel Jerome
A1  - Hechavarria-Cueria, Julio C.
A1  - Kössl, Manfred
T1  - Temporal tuning in the bat auditory cortex is sharper when studied with natural echolocation sequences
T2  - Scientific reports
N2  - Precise temporal coding is necessary for proper acoustic analysis. However, at cortical level, forward suppression appears to limit the ability of neurons to extract temporal information from natural sound sequences. Here we studied how temporal processing can be maintained in the bats’ cortex in the presence of suppression evoked by natural echolocation streams that are relevant to the bats’ behavior. We show that cortical neurons tuned to target-distance actually profit from forward suppression induced by natural echolocation sequences. These neurons can more precisely extract target distance information when they are stimulated with natural echolocation sequences than during stimulation with isolated call-echo pairs. We conclude that forward suppression does for time domain tuning what lateral inhibition does for selectivity forms such as auditory frequency tuning and visual orientation tuning. When talking about cortical processing, suppression should be seen as a mechanistic tool rather than a limiting element.
KW  - Animal physiology
KW  - Cortex
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/45107
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-451072
SN  - 2045-2322
N1  - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
VL  - 6
IS  - Art. 29102
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature
CY  - [London]
ER  -