Adaptive, behaviorally-gated, persistent encoding of task-relevant auditory information in ferret frontal cortex

Top-down signals from frontal cortex (FC) are conjectured to play a critical role in cognitive control of sensory processing. To explore this interaction, we compared activity in ferret FC and primary auditory cortex (A1) during auditory and visual tasks requiring discrimination between classes of reference and target stimuli. FC responses were behaviorally-gated, selectively encoded the timing and invariant behavioral meaning of target stimuli, could be rapid in onset, and sometimes persisted for hours following behavior. This mirrors earlier findings in A1that attention triggered rapid, selective, persistent, task-related changes in spectrotemporal receptive fields. Simultaneously recorded local field potentials (LFPs) revealed behaviorally-gated changes in inter-areal coherence, selectively modulated between FC and focal regions of A1 responsive to target sounds. These results suggest that A1 and FC dynamically establish a functional connection during auditory behavior that shapes the flow of sensory information and maintains a persistent trace of recent task-relevant stimulus features.