Laminar specificity of oscillatory coherence in the auditory cortex

Empirical evidence suggests that, in the auditory cortex (AC), the phase relationship between spikes and local-field potentials (LFPs) plays an important role in the processing of auditory stimuli. Nevertheless, unlike the case of other sensory systems, it remains largely unexplored in the auditory modality whether the properties of the cortical columnar microcircuit shape the dynamics of spike–LFP coherence in a layer-specific manner. In this study, we directly tackle this issue by addressing whether spike–LFP and LFP–stimulus phase synchronization are spatially distributed in the AC during sensory processing, by performing laminar recordings in the cortex of awake short-tailed bats (Carollia perspicillata) while animals listened to conspecific distress vocalizations. We show that, in the AC, spike–LFP and LFP–stimulus synchrony depend significantly on cortical depth, and that sensory stimulation alters the spatial and spectral patterns of spike–LFP phase-locking. We argue that such laminar distribution of coherence could have functional implications for the representation of naturalistic auditory stimuli at a cortical level.