Dynamic Receptive Fields in Auditory Cortex: Feature Selectivity and Organizational Principles

Abstract

Spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) capture the time-dependent behavior of spectral profile processing in auditory neurons. Here we review recent advances in utilizing these functional descriptors in exploring organizational principles of primary auditory cortex, such as cellular and laminar differences. In addition, we discuss an extension of the classical spectrotemporal filter approach that provides additional, independent spectrotemporal features that, combined with nonlinearities, allows a more complete characterization of cortical processing.