Time-independent sensory representations are essential for behavioral learning and perception

AbstractThe brain constantly associates time-varying sensory inputs with behavioral decisions. However, how temporal information in sensory neuronal circuits is linked to perception and behavioral output remains unclear. Here, by training mice to categorize patterned optogenetic stimulations in the auditory cortex, we show that they fail to learn a discrimination between two activity patterns that differ only by their temporal structure. Moreover, using large scale recordings throughout the auditory system, we show that the auditory cortex reformats upstream representations of sounds to make temporal information available as a time-independent rate code, coexisting with temporally structured activity. Thus, by resolving the inefficiency of downstream learning rules in the temporal domain, the auditory cortex enables specific associations of temporally-structured sounds to perceptual decisions.One Sentence SummaryAuditory cortex reformats temporal information to make it available for downstream learning rules blind to time sequences.