Audiovisual task switching rapidly modulates sound encoding in mouse auditory cortex

Abstract

In everyday behavior, sensory systems are in constant competition for attentional resources, but the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms of modality-selective attention remain largely uninvestigated. We conducted translaminar recordings in mouse auditory cortex (AC) during an audiovisual (AV) attention shifting task. Attending to sound elements in an AV stream reduced both pre-stimulus and stimulus-evoked spiking activity, primarily in deep layer neurons. Despite reduced spiking, stimulus decoder accuracy was preserved, suggesting improved sound encoding efficiency. Similarly, task-irrelevant probe stimuli during intertrial intervals evoked fewer spikes without impairing stimulus encoding, indicating that these attention influences generalized beyond training stimuli. Importantly, these spiking reductions predicted trial-to-trial behavioral accuracy during auditory attention, but not visual attention. Together, these findings suggest auditory attention facilitates sound discrimination by filtering sound-irrelevant spiking in AC, and that the deepest cortical layers may serve as a hub for integrating extramodal contextual information.