Nonuniform impacts of forward suppression on neural responses to preferred stimuli and nonpreferred stimuli in the rat auditory cortex

In natural conditions, human and animals need to extract target sound information from noisy acoustic environments for communication and survival. However, how the contextual environmental sounds impact the tuning of central auditory neurons to target sound source azimuth over a wide range of sound levels is not fully understood. Here, we determined the azimuth-level response areas (ALRAs) of rat auditory cortex neurons by recording their responses to probe tones varying with levels and sound source azimuths under both quiet (probe alone) and forward masking conditions (preceding noise + probe). In quiet, cortical neurons responded stronger to their preferred stimuli than to their nonpreferred stimuli. In forward masking conditions, an effective preceding noise reduced the extents of the ALRAs and suppressed the neural responses across the ALRAs by decreasing the response strength and lengthening the first-spike latency. The forward suppressive effect on neural response strength was increased with increasing masker level and decreased with prolonging the time interval between masker and probe. For a portion of cortical neurons studied, the effects of forward suppression on the response strength to preferred stimuli was weaker than those to nonpreferred stimuli, and the recovery from forward suppression of the response strength to preferred stimuli was earlier than that to nonpreferred stimuli. We suggest that this nonuniform forward suppression of neural responses to preferred stimuli and to nonpreferred stimuli is important for cortical neurons to maintain their relative stable preferences for target sound source azimuth and level in noisy acoustic environments.