Increasing excitation versus decreasing inhibition in auditory cortex: consequences on the discrimination performance between communication sounds

Key points Enhancing cortical excitability can be achieved by either reducing intracortical inhibition or by enhancing intracortical excitation. Here we compare the consequences of reducing intracortical inhibition and of enhancing intracortical excitation on the processing of communication sounds in the primary auditory cortex. Local application of gabazine and of AMPA enlarged the spectrotemporal receptive fields and increased the responses to communication to the same extent. The Mutual Information (an index of the cortical neurons’ ability to discriminate between natural sounds) was increased in both cases, as were the noise and signal correlations. Spike‐timing reliability was only increased after gabazine application and post‐excitation suppression was affected in the opposite way: it was increased when reducing the intracortical inhibition but was eliminated by enhancing the excitation. A computational model suggests that these results can be explained by an additive effect vs . a multiplicative effectAbstract The level of excitability of cortical circuits is often viewed as one of the critical factors controlling perceptive performance. In theory, enhancing cortical excitability can be achieved either by reducing inhibitory currents or by increasing excitatory currents. Here, we evaluated whether reducing inhibitory currents or increasing excitatory currents in auditory cortex similarly affects the neurons’ ability to discriminate between communication sounds. We attenuated the inhibitory currents by application of gabazine (GBZ), and increased the excitatory currents by applying AMPA in the auditory cortex while testing frequency receptive fields and responses to communication sounds. GBZ and AMPA enlarged the receptive fields and increased the responses to communication sounds to the same extent. The spike‐timing reliability of neuronal responses was largely increased when attenuating the intracortical inhibition but not after increasing the excitation. The discriminative abilities of cortical cells increased in both cases but this increase was more pronounced after attenuating the inhibition. The shape of the response to communication sounds was modified in the opposite direction: reducing inhibition increased post‐excitation suppression whereas this suppression tended to disappear when increasing the excitation. A computational model indicates that the additive effect promoted by AMPA vs . the multiplicative effect of GBZ on neuronal responses, together with the dynamics of spontaneous cortical activity, can explain these differences. Thus, although apparently equivalent for increasing cortical excitability, acting on inhibition vs . on excitation impacts differently the cortical ability to discriminate natural stimuli, and only modulating inhibition changed efficiently the cortical representation of communication sounds.