Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wang, Yunyan
• Shanbhag, Sharad J
• Fischer, Brian J
• Peña, José L

Titel

Population-wide bias of surround suppression in auditory spatial receptive fields of the owl's midbrain

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of neuroscience, 2012-08, Vol.32 (31), p.10470-10478

Ort / Verlag

United States: Society for Neuroscience

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

EZB-FREE-00999 freely available EZB journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The physical arrangement of receptive fields (RFs) within neural structures is important for local computations. Nonuniform distribution of tuning within populations of neurons can influence emergent tuning properties, causing bias in local processing. This issue was studied in the auditory system of barn owls. The owl's external nucleus of the inferior colliculus (ICx) contains a map of auditory space in which the frontal region is overrepresented. We measured spatiotemporal RFs of ICx neurons using spatial white noise. We found a population-wide bias in surround suppression such that suppression from frontal space was stronger. This asymmetry increased with laterality in spatial tuning. The bias could be explained by a model of lateral inhibition based on the overrepresentation of frontal space observed in ICx. The model predicted trends in surround suppression across ICx that matched the data. Thus, the uneven distribution of spatial tuning within the map could explain the topography of time-dependent tuning properties. This mechanism may have significant implications for the analysis of natural scenes by sensory systems.