However, we observed a few local populations that yielded reliable predictions of categorization behavior for specific target sound pairs comparable to those obtained from the global population vectors (Figure 8A). There were at least 2 selleck chemical to 4 local populations for each target sound pair for which the prediction error was significantly lower than chance levels. The predictive quality of off-target sound categorization by single local populations was correlated with the performance that population in discriminating that target sound pair (Figure 8B). This indicates that neural populations which give the most reliable information

to solve the discrimination task readily reflect in their dynamics the behaviorally observed sound categorization (Figure 8C). Therefore, it is conceivable that the sound categories implemented by discrete Target Selective Inhibitor Library local response

modes form a basis of available perceptual decisions which are selected by learning depending on the behavioral demand. In summary, our findings reveal a coding strategy in the AC in which sound information is distributed globally to counterbalance the limited and stochastic coding observed locally. Our full data set is consistent with classical tonotopic maps; however, the discreteness of local network response patterns was unexpected, since it was widely assumed that AC neurons build a continuum of receptive fields even at local scales. Our observations provide direct evidence that the auditory cortex network is constituted of partially overlapping subnetworks in which individual neurons play redundant roles as recently proposed

in an earlier study to explain the spatial distribution of pairwise correlations (Rothschild et al., 2010). This has the important implication that the smooth shape of trial-averaged single cell tuning curves largely reflects variations in the probability to elicit the same, stereotyped stochastic network pattern. Our recordings were performed in a 200 × Cell press 200 μm field of view. The fact that almost 80% of them showed a single response mode could indicate that the typical spatial extent of the subnetworks corresponding to a response mode is significantly larger. While our observations are consistent with a columnar organization of the mouse auditory cortex (Mountcastle, 1997), it should be noted that the dynamics of the infragranular layers is to some extent dissociated from the dynamics of layers II and III and thus the organization of sound evoked patterns in discrete response modes could be a specificity of the supragranular layers (Sakata and Harris, 2009). One important result of our study is that the network activity carries little information about sounds at the local scale because of the high constraint on local activity patterns.