Early Hearing-Impairment Results in Crossmodal Reorganization of Ferret Core Auditory Cortex
Figure 3
Sensory responses of neurons from core auditory cortex of ferrets with early hearing impairment. Single-unit recordings revealed that neurons were responsive to auditory (square wave, white noise), somatosensory (ramp; 1 g filament displacement of skin/hair) or combined auditory-somatosensory stimulation as displayed in the raster/histogram rows. In (a), the neuron was unresponsive to the auditory stimulus, but was vigorously activated by the somatosensory cue, and this response was not significantly altered when the two stimuli were combined. These responses are summarized by the bar graph (far right; error = standard error; sp = spontaneous activity), and are characteristic of a unisensory somatosensory neuron. The same conventions are used in the subsequent rows where activity indicative of a neuron with unisensory auditory properties (b) and a neuron with bimodal auditory-somatosensory response features (c) are illustrated. None of the depicted responses to combined stimulation were significantly (paired t-test) different from their best unisensory responses. These data show that core auditory cortical neurons in these hearing-impaired animals exhibit vigorous somatosensory-evoked activity.
