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Published March 8, 2012 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The Generation of Direction Selectivity in the Auditory System

Abstract

Both human speech and animal vocal signals contain frequency-modulated (FM) sounds. Although central auditory neurons that selectively respond to the direction of frequency modulation are known, the synaptic mechanisms underlying the generation of direction selectivity (DS) remain elusive. Here we show the emergence of DS neurons in the inferior colliculus by mapping the three major subcortical auditory nuclei. Cell-attached recordings reveal a highly reliable and precise firing of DS neurons to FM sweeps in a preferred direction. By using in vivo whole-cell current-clamp and voltage-clamp recordings, we found that the synaptic inputs to DS neurons are not direction selective, but temporally reversed excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs are evoked in response to opposing directions of FM sweeps. The construction of such temporal asymmetry, resulting DS, and its topography can be attributed to the spectral disparity of the excitatory and the inhibitory synaptic tonal receptive fields.

Additional Information

© 2012 Elsevier Inc. Accepted 29 November 2011. Available online 7 March 2012. Published: March 7, 2012. We thank M. Konishi, C.E. Carr, C. Koch, and S. Cassenaer for the discussion and comments to the manuscript and the study and A.D. Steele and J. Lin for critical reading and style checking. We thank H.A. Lester for the discussion of biophysical properties of neurons and space-clamping issues. This work was supported by grants to G.K.W. from the Broad Fellows Program in Brain Circuitry of the Broad Foundation and the California Institute of Technology. We also thank the Division of Biology of Caltech for generous support in providing us laboratory space.

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