Fig. 5.

Detecting spectro-temporal tuning changes in simulated and actual neural data. A: simulated spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) undergoing changes that might occur during behavioral experiments. Left column: during passive stimulation before the behavioral experiment, 3 STRFs are tuned to different frequencies centered at 3, 4, and 7 KHz. The target tone during the experiment is at 3 KHz. Right column: during behavior, the STRF closest to the target tone becomes more sensitive to the target tone by broadening its excitatory field toward the target frequency. B: reconstructed TORCs using passive (top) and active (middle) simulated responses. The change in the STRF at 3 KHz causes the TORC reconstruction to change locally, which can be detected by subtracting the 2 TORC spectrograms (bottom). C: top: mean-squared difference (averaged over time) between active and passive simulated spectrograms with the peak difference at the target frequency (red bar). Bottom: the average mean squared difference between spectrograms reconstructed from actual neural responses before and during behavior. The error was calculated separately for 6 groups of neurons (grouped according to target frequency) and aligned at the target frequency before averaging. As in the simulation, the difference between reconstructions contains a peak at the target frequency (red bar).