Passive exposure to speech sounds induces long-term memory representations in the auditory cortex of adult rats

摘要

Experience-induced changes in the functioning of the auditory cortex are prominent in early life,especially during a critical period. Although auditory perceptual learning takes place automaticallyduring this critical period, it is thought to require active training in later life. Previous studiesdemonstrated rapid changes in single-cell responses of anesthetized adult animals while exposed tosounds presented in a statistical learning paradigm. However, whether passive exposure to soundscan form long-term memory representations remains to be demonstrated. To investigate this issue,we first exposed adult rats to human speech sounds for 3 consecutive days, 12h/d. Two groups of ratsexposed to either spectrotemporal or tonal changes in speech sounds served as controls for each other.Then, electrophysiological brain responses from the auditory cortex were recorded to the same stimuli.In both the exposure and test phase statistical learning paradigm, was applied. The exposure effectwas found for the spectrotemporal sounds, but not for the tonal sounds. Only the animals exposed tospectrotemporal sounds differentiated subtle changes in these stimuli as indexed by the mismatchnegativity response. The results point to the occurrence of long-term memory traces for the speechsounds due to passive exposure in adult animals.