2018 Volume 61 Issue 4 Pages 245-253
Considering the anatomical and functional characteristics of the cerebral cortex, where each neuron receives massive synaptic inputs, on the order of 104 inputs, and information processing in the brain is highly recursive, we investigated how auditory perception is correlated with phase synchrony in the auditory cortex of rats. In this article, we first introduce the common indices of phase synchrony: inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) and phase locking value (PLV). We then review our recent studies to discuss the functional roles of these phase synchronies in our auditory perception. Our experiments demonstrated that ITPC in the gamma band better explained the psychophysics of auditory streaming than the conventional properties of auditory evoked potentials. The PLV depended on the sound quality, such as consonance and tonality. These results support our hypotheses that phase synchrony in the auditory cortex is more closely related with subjective auditory perception as compared to conventional characterization of evoked potentials.