Powered by Indico
v3.2.3
Complex sensory stimuli, such as chords in a song melody, can be reliably recognized. However, it is unclear how these complex sensory items are represented by single neurons in the brain. Here, we trained mice to associate sound stimuli with voluntary licking and investigated learning-induced transformation of neurons in primary auditory cortex. We demonstrate that learning transformed a small fraction of neurons from the common singlet firing to a bursting mode that was associated with large Ca2+ transients. This transformation was reversed by behavioral extinction. Strikingly, in mice that learned to associate licking with chords consisting of 4 pure tones, we encountered not only neurons responding to the constituent pure tones but also ‘holistic’ neurons responding to just the chord but not to the individual components. This reliable and specific representation of the learned chords by single learning-transformed ‘holistic’ bursting neurons reveals a high-level computation in a primary sensory cortex.
Hongbo Jia, PhD., is currently a research fellow and principal investigator at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His lab is focused on the development and application of advanced optical tools for measuring neural network activities at single-cell and sub-cellular precision in intact living brains.Having experienced in nanomaterial research and obtained diploma in physics, Dr. Jia mastered the skills of programming interactive physical instruments to operate in real-time. During his PhD studies, he constructed microscopes that could perform simultaneous two-photon Ca2+ imaging and patch-clamp recording in-vivo, and with which, he made a major contribution to neuroscience: the finding of the “salt-&-pepper” mode of distribution of multiple different sensory input features in the dendrites of single cortical neurons (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08947).With the help of these advanced neuroscience tools and the extensive experimental research works at the lab of his best collaborator Dr. Xiaowei Chen, Dr. Jia’s primary interest is to find universal physical rules emerging at different scales of spacetime for the most intricate object in the universe: the brain.