Deviance Distraction and Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in the Somatosensory Cortex Reduce with Experience

Abstract

Automatic detection of a surprising change in the sensory input is a central element of exogenous attentional control. Stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) is a potential neuronal mechanism detecting such changes and has been robustly described across sensory modalities and different instances of the ascending sensory pathways. However, little is known about the relationship of SSA to perception. To assess how deviating stimuli influence target signal detection, we used a behavioral crossmodal paradigm in mice and combined it with extracellular recordings from the primary somatosensory whisker cortex. In this paradigm, male mice performed a visual detection task while task-irrelevant whisker stimuli were either presented as repetitive “standard” or as rare deviant stimuli. We found a deviance distraction effect on the animals’ performance: Faster reaction times but worsened target detection was observed in the presence of a deviant stimulus. Multiunit activity and local field potentials exhibited enhanced neuronal responses to deviant compared with standard whisker stimuli across all cortical layers, as a result of SSA. The deviant-triggered behavioral distraction correlated with these enhanced neuronal deviant responses only in the deeper cortical layers. However, the layer-specific effect of SSA on perception reduced with increasing task experience as a result of statistical distractor learning. These results demonstrate a layer-specific involvement of SSA on perception that is susceptible to modulation over time.