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Development of inhibitory timescales in auditory cortex.

ABSTRACT: The time course of inhibition plays an important role in cortical sensitivity, tuning, and temporal response properties. We investigated the development of L2/3 inhibitory circuitry between fast-spiking (FS) interneurons and pyramidal cells (PCs) in auditory thalamocortical slices from mice between postnatal day 10 (P10) and P29. We found that the maturation of the intrinsic and synaptic properties of both FS cells and their connected PCs influence the timescales of inhibition. FS cell firing rates increased with age owing to decreased membrane time constants, shorter afterhyperpolarizations, and narrower action potentials. Between FS-PC pairs, excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) changed with age. The latencies, rise, and peak times of the IPSPs, as well as the decay constants of both EPSPs and IPSPs decreased between P10 and P29. In addition, decreases in short-term depression at excitatory PC-FS synapses resulted in more sustained synaptic responses during repetitive stimulation. Finally, we show that during early development, the temporal properties that influence the recruitment of inhibition lag those of excitation. Taken together, our results suggest that the changes in the timescales of inhibitory recruitment coincide with the development of the tuning and temporal response properties of auditory cortical networks.

SUBMITTER: Oswald AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3097987 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The cortex represents information across widely varying timescales. For instance, sensory cortex encodes stimuli that fluctuate over few tens of milliseconds, whereas in association cortex behavioural choices can require the maintenance of information over seconds. However, it remains poorly understood whether diverse timescales result mostly from features intrinsic to individual neurons or from neuronal population activity. This question remains unanswered, because the timescales of coding in populations of neurons have not been studied extensively, and population codes have not been compared systematically across cortical regions. Here we show that population codes can be essential to achieve long coding timescales. Furthermore, we find that the properties of population codes differ between sensory and association cortices. We compared coding for sensory stimuli and behavioural choices in auditory cortex and posterior parietal cortex as mice performed a sound localization task. Auditory stimulus information was stronger in auditory cortex than in posterior parietal cortex, and both regions contained choice information. Although auditory cortex and posterior parietal cortex coded information by tiling in time neurons that were transiently informative for approximately 200 milliseconds, the areas had major differences in functional coupling between neurons, measured as activity correlations that could not be explained by task events. Coupling among posterior parietal cortex neurons was strong and extended over long time lags, whereas coupling among auditory cortex neurons was weak and short-lived. Stronger coupling in posterior parietal cortex led to a population code with long timescales and a representation of choice that remained consistent for approximately 1 second. In contrast, auditory cortex had a code with rapid fluctuations in stimulus and choice information over hundreds of milliseconds. Our results reveal that population codes differ across cortex and that coupling is a variable property of cortical populations that affects the timescale of information coding and the accuracy of behaviour.

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Development of inhibitory timescales in auditory cortex.

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