Temporal-coherence induces binding of responses to sound sequences in ferret auditory cortex

Binding the attributes of a sensory source is necessary to perceive it as a unified entity within its surrounding scene as in the cocktail party problem in auditory perception. It is postulated that coherent temporal modu- lation of a source's features binds them and enhances their perception. This study seeks evidence for rapid binding among coherently responsive single-neurons in ferret auditory cortex. In one experiment, ferrets at- tended to a sequence of noise bursts while we contrasted responses to simultaneous synchronized versus alternating tone sequences. We found that the contrast between synchronized (enhanced) and desynchron- ized (suppressed) responses rapidly increased, thus promoting their segregation. In another experiment, a sequence of an irregularly repeated multi-tone complex was embedded in a background of randomly dispersed tones. Single-unit and functional ultrasound imaging of responses to the temporally coherent tones of the complex became rapidly enhanced against the background responses, demonstrating the role of temporal-coherence in binding and segregation.