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SUMMARY:Prof. Tania Rinaldi Barkat: "White noise background improves tone 
 discrimination by suppressing cortical tuning curves"
DTSTART:20190624T150000
DTEND:20190624T160000
DTSTAMP:20260406T194553Z
UID:3f7bd96f87244c263d4d7ad64ff42e5440b113a9387df24cd3a978f6
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Tania Barkat\, Department of Biomedicine of University o
 f Basel.\nThe brain faces the difficult task of maintaining a stable repre
 sentation of key features of the outside world in noisy sensory surroundin
 gs. How does the sensory representation change with noise\, and how does t
 he brain make sense of it? We investigated the effect of background white 
 noise (WN) on tuning properties of neurons in mouse A1 and its impact on d
 iscrimination performance in a go/nogo task. We found that WN suppresses a
 ctivity of A1 neurons\, which surprisingly increases the discriminability 
 of tones spectrally close to each other. To confirm the involvement of A1\
 , we optogenetically excited parvalbumin positive (PV+) neurons in A1 whic
 h had similar effects as WN on both tuning properties and frequency discri
 mination. A population model suggests that suppression of A1 tuning curves
  increases frequency selectivity and thereby improves discrimination. Our 
 findings demonstrate that the cortical representation of pure tones adapts
  during noise to improve sensory acuity.
LOCATION:B1 6 272.043 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room=B16272.043
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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