The linearity of emergent spectro-temporal receptive fields in a model of auditory cortex

The responses of cortical neurons are often characterized by measuring their spectro-temporal receptive fields (strfs). The strf of a cell can be thought of as a representation of its stimulus `preference' but it is also a filter or `kernel' that represents the best linear prediction of the response of that cell to any stimulus. A range of in vivo strfs with varying properties have been reported in various species, although none in humans. Using a computational model it has been shown that responses of ensembles of artificial strfs, derived from limited sets of formative stimuli, preserve information about utterance class and prosody as well as the identity and sex of the speaker in a model speech classification system. In this work we help to put this idea on a biologically plausible footing by developing a simple model thalamo-cortical system built of conductance based neurons and synapses some of which exhibit spike-timedependent plasticity. We show that the neurons in su...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BIOSYSTEMS
• Authors: Martin Coath, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, Sue L. Denham, Michael J. Denham
• Keywords: BIOSYSTEMS 2008, Formative Stimuli, Model, Neurons