PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Luciana López-Jury
AU  - Adrian Mannel
AU  - Francisco Garcia-Rosales
AU  - Julio C. Hechavarria
TI  - Precision of auditory responses deteriorates on the way to frontal cortical areas
AID  - 10.1101/688549
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 688549
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/02/688549.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/02/688549.full
AB  - Frontal areas of the mammalian cortex are thought to be important for cognitive control and complex behaviour. These areas have been studied mostly in humans, non-human primates and rodents. In this article, we present a quantitative characterization of response properties of a frontal auditory area responsive to sound in the bat brain, the frontal auditory field (FAF). Bats are highly vocal animals and they constitute an important experimental model for studying the auditory system. At present, little is known about neuronal sound processing in the bat FAF. We combined electrophysiology experiments and computational simulations to compare the response properties of auditory neurons found in the bat FAF and auditory cortex (AC) to simple sounds (pure tones). Anatomical studies have shown that the latter provide feedforward inputs to the former. Our results show that bat FAF neurons are responsive to sounds, however, when compared to AC neurons, they presented sparser, less precise spiking and longer-lasting responses. Based on the results of an integrate-and-fire neuronal model, we speculate that slow, low-threshold, synaptic dynamics could contribute to the changes in activity pattern that occur as information travels through cortico-cortical projections from the AC to the FAF.