Original Research ARTICLE

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Optical imaging of interaural time difference representation in rat auditory cortex

1
Washington University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, St Louis, MO, USA
2
Kyoto University, Human Brain Research Center, Kyoto, Japan
3
Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, USA
4
Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Department of Physiology, Kyoto, Japan
We used in vivo voltage-sensitive dye optical imaging to examine the cortical representation of interaural time difference (ITD), which is believed to be involved in sound source localization. We found that acoustic stimuli with dissimilar ITD activate various localized domains in the auditory cortex. The main loci of the activation pattern shift up to 1 mm during the first 40 ms of the response period. We suppose that some of the neurons in each pool are sensitive to the definite ITD and involved in the transduction of information about sound source localization, based on the ITD. This assumption gives a reasonable fit to the Jeffress model in which the neural network calculates the ITD to define the direction of the sound source. Such calculation forms the basis for the cortex’s ability to detect the azimuth of the sound source.
Keywords:
auditory cortex, interaural time difference, optical imaging, voltage-sensitive dye
Citation:
Tsytsarev V, Fukuyama H, Pope D, Pumbo E and Kimura M (2009). Optical imaging of interaural time difference representation in rat auditory cortex. Front. Neuroeng. 2:2. doi: 10.3389/neuro.16.002.2009
Received:
23 October 2008;
 Paper pending published:
17 November 2008;
Accepted:
31 January 2009;
 Published online:
02 March 2009.

Edited by:

Fabio Benfenati, University of Genoa, Italy

Reviewed by:

Egidio D'Angelo, University of Pavia, Italy
Paolo Medini, The Italian Institute of Technology, Italy
Copyright:
© 2009 Tsytsarev, Fukuyama, Pope, Pumbo and Kimura. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Vassiliy Tsytsarev, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St Louis, Campus Box 1097, One Brookings Drive, St Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA. e-mail: tsytsarev@seas.wustl.edu
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