Mechanisms of Adaptive Information Processing

摘要

It has long been known that associative processes rapidly induce increasedresponses to acoustic signals in the auditory cortex. This facilitation could be due either to a general increase in responsivity to acoustic (or even all sensory) stimulation, or to a specific change in the way that information is processed, represented and stored, i.e., it could reflect adaptive information processing. Our previous studies have resolved that issue by determining the effects of classical conditioning on the frequency receptive fields of neurons in the auditory cortex. They provided unequivocal support that learning involves adaptive information processing (Diamond and Weinberger, 1986; 1989). Thus, responses to the CS frequency were specifically increased whereas responses to other frequencies, including the pre-training best frequency, were reduced. This pattern of change was often large enough to produce a strong retuning of cells such that the frequency of the CS became the best frequency (Bakin and Weinberger, 1990). This project tests a model of such adaptive information processing.