Landemard, Agnès;
Bimbard, Célian;
Boubenec, Yves;
(2025)
Hierarchical encoding of natural sound mixtures in ferret auditory cortex.
eLife
, 14
, Article RP106628. 10.7554/elife.106628.3.
Preview |
Text
Lendemard_elife-106628-v1.pdf Download (5MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Extracting relevant auditory signals from complex natural scenes is a fundamental challenge for the auditory system. Sounds from multiple sources overlap in time and frequency. In particular, dynamic ‘foreground’ sounds are often masked by more stationary ‘background’ sounds. Human auditory cortex exhibits a hierarchical organization where background-invariant representations are progressively enhanced along the processing stream, from primary to non-primary regions. However, we do not know whether this organizational principle is conserved across species and which neural mechanisms drive this invariance. To address these questions, we investigated background invariance in ferret auditory cortex using functional ultrasound imaging, which enables large-scale, high-resolution recordings of hemodynamic responses. We measured responses across primary, secondary, and tertiary auditory cortical regions as ferrets passively listened to mixtures of natural sounds and their components in isolation. We found a hierarchical gradient of background invariance, mirroring findings in humans: responses in primary auditory cortex reflected contributions from both foreground and background sounds, while background invariance increased in higher-order auditory regions. Using a spectrotemporal filter-bank model, we found that in ferrets this hierarchical structure could be largely explained by tuning to low-order acoustic features. However, this model failed to fully account for background invariance in human non-primary auditory cortex, suggesting that additional, higher-order mechanisms are crucial for background segregation in humans.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Hierarchical encoding of natural sound mixtures in ferret auditory cortex |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.7554/elife.106628.3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.106628.3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025, Landemard et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Institute of Ophthalmology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214592 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
