Immature sensory organs, including the eyes and ears, generate spontaneous activity that reaches the brain and helps organize cortical circuits. But developing animals also act on the world before their sensory systems can reliably transmit external information. Could those early self-generated actions influence sensory-cortex development?
Didhiti and Chih-Ting thus tested whether pup vocalizations are linked to activity in the auditory cortex. Using imaging, they found that the auditory cortex was activated during vocal bouts. This also happened in deaf pups, indicating that “hearing” is not required.
They then identified areas in the frontal cortex (ACC/M2) that were activated whenever the pups vocalized and that these areas projected to the auditory cortex. Silencing these areas abolished vocalizations and the vocalization-related activity in the auditory cortex.
We propose that this pathway may help prepare—or “prime”—auditory cortex before reliable sound-driven input becomes available. For example, it could influence the synaptic maturation of developing auditory circuits.
Thus our data indicate that early actions, in this case vocalizations, influence the neural activity of the developing sensory cortex and thereby might be able to shape development.

Read here in Science Advances

Yunru looked at harmonic sensitivity in A1 and A2. She found harmonic-sensitive neurons (HNs) responding only to harmonic stacks but not to individual frequencies in all areas at similar proportions. Thus, harmonic sensitivity is already established in A1 L4. Thus, tuning to sounds of complex spectral contents might be a fundamental processing function of the auditory cortex and is already established in A1 L4, which receives major thalamic inputs. Read more here eNeuro 2026.

To partially synthesize a lot of things we have learned about the aging auditory cortex we wrote a review. Read it in JARO

This was a long lift to get everything right. Hijee and Travis perfected in vivo holographic neuronal stimulation to stimulate small groups of individual auditory cortex neurons in vivo and test how this affects sound evoked responses. They shows that auditory cortex neurons with shared functional properties rapidly adjust their responses during sensory processing, revealing a circuit-level mechanism that regulates overall network activity balance. Read the paper here in eLife.

We showed a long time ago that the frequency organization of the auditory cortex on the single cell level is pretty messy. But does it mean that all functional connections are random or unorganized? Peter did careful 2-photon imaging and in collaboration with Sahar and Anuthhara from the Babadi lab shows that even though the frequency preference of neighboring neurons in A1 is functionally diverse, the functional connection patterns are functionally precise and harmonically related. Read more here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/…

Age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) is common in humans and can be caused by a dysfunction of the peripheral and central auditory system. Jenny and Binghan here compare auditory cortex circuits in vitro in adult and aged CBA mice, which retain an intact peripheral auditory system into old age. They find a sex-specific reduction in excitatory and inhibitory intralaminar cortical circuits in the aged mice that might underlie the differential functional manifestations of age-related hearing loss in both males and females. Read details here in eNeuro.

Our prior work had shown that adult visual deprivation can change circuits in the auditory cortex. Now Peter shows that temporary visual deprivation in adults can improve functional hearing and even attenuate age related high-frequency hearing loss. Read more here in iScience.

Listening in complex sound environments requires rapid segregation of different sound sources, e.g., having a conversation with multiple speakers or other environmental sounds. Efficient processing requires fast (implicit) learning of inputs to adapt to target sounds and identify relevant information from past experiences. using naturalistic complex stimuli HiJee shows that subgroups of excitatory and inhibitory cells in auditory cortex (Actx) showed decreased responses, even in the input layers of ACtx, for re-occurring Target sounds, indicating that ACtx is involved in the early implicit learning phase for auditory memory. Read more here in Progress in Neurobiology.

Mingxuan built an automatic head-fixation and imaging system to study how learning changes the representation of sounds in auditory cortex and the interactions between auditory cortex regions. Read the paper in Cell Reports here and a story about it here.

What happens to the molecular areal makeup of the whole cortex when you lose sensory inputs?  Great collaboration with Xiaoyin Chen (Allen Institute), Jesse Gillis (Toronto), Stephan Fisher (Inst. Pasteur) and Tony Zador (CSHL) using modern tools addresses this old question in unprecedented detail.  Using a high-throughput in situ sequencing technique (BARseq) over the whole cortex we show that binocular enucleation caused a shift of the cell-type compositional profiles of visual areas towards neighbouring cortical areas within the same module, suggesting that peripheral inputs sharpen the distinct transcriptomic identities of areas within cortical modules.  Read the paper in Nature. AIB news release