Differentially responsive adjacent auditory cortical cells maintained coordinated firing.
Temporal relationships between adjacent single cells were studied in the auditory cortex of the waking guinea pig during silence and pure tone stimulation. One cell of each pair was responsive while the other was completely unresponsive Coordinated discharge was found for spontaneous activity in 14/17 (82%) pairs, generally at and near the origin of cross correlation histograms (CCHs, 5 ms bins). These relationships, involving the same temporal intervals, were also maintained during tone driven discharges of the responsive cell. Thus, responsive neurons may participate simultaneously in specific sensory processing tasks while also responding to a presumptive common modulatory influence within a local network, without the two processes necessarily being linked. Therefore, responsive cells may have greater information processing capacity than realized.