ABSTRACT
Auditory experience leads to myriad changes in auditory processing from the periphery to the auditory cortex. Many different forms of plasticity have been described (at least nine varieties are defined by Calford, 2002). Over the past 30 years, studies of plasticity in the primary auditory cortex (A1) have revealed profound effects on the global level, notably by the reshaping of cortical maps, and on the local level, by the transformation of neuronal receptive field properties (Edeline, 1999, 2003; Suga et al., 2002; Suga & Ma, 2003; Weinberger, 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2004). The form of cortical plasticity appears to be determined by (a) the behavioral salience or task-relevance of the spectral and temporal characteristics of the acoustic stimuli, and (b) the time course of training in perceptual learning (Recanzone et al., 1993, but see Irvine, 2004). In a non-behavioral model of salience-shaped plasticity, the form of plasticity is determined by the specific pairing of acoustic stimuli and stimulated reward pathways in cellular associative learning (Bakin & Weinberger, 1996; Kilgard et al., 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Kilgard & Merzenich, 2002). In this chapter, we focus
on a particular form of plasticity, which we have called task-related plasticity (Fritz et al., 2003a, 2004), arising from behaviorally-driven rapid modulation of neuronal receptive fields in A1.
