Streaming of repeated noise in primary and secondary fields of auditory cortex

Statistical regularities in natural sounds facilitate the perceptual segregation of auditory sources, or streams. Repetition is one cue that drives stream segregation in humans, but the neural basis of this perceptual phenomenon remains unknown. We demonstrated a similar perceptual ability in animals by training ferrets to detect a stream of repeating noise samples (foreground) embedded in a stream of random samples (background). During passive listening, we recorded neural activity in primary (A1) and secondary (PEG) fields of auditory cortex. We used two context-dependent encoding models to test for evidence of streaming of the repeating stimulus. The first was based on average evoked activity per noise sample and the second on the spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF). Both approaches tested whether changes in the neural response to repeating versus random stimuli were better modeled by scaling the response to both streams equally (global gain) or by separately scaling the response to the foreground versus background stream (stream-specific gain). Consistent with previous observations of adaptation, we found an overall reduction in global gain when the stimulus began to repeat. However, when we measured stream-specific changes in gain, responses to the foreground were enhanced relative to the background. This enhancement was stronger in PEG than A1. In A1, enhancement was strongest in units with low sparseness (i.e., broad sensory tuning) and with tuning selective for the repeated sample. Enhancement of responses to the foreground relative to the background provides evidence for stream segregation that emerges in A1 and is refined in PEG.