Spontaneous activity resembling tone-evoked activity in the primary auditory cortex of guinea pigs

In the primary auditory cortex (AI), a pure tone evokes propagating activity along a strip of the cortex. We have previously shown that focal activation of AI triggers autonomously propagating activity that resembles tone-evoked activity ( Song et al., 2006). Because a focal spontaneous activity is expected to trigger similar activity propagation, spontaneous activity resembling tone-evoked activity may exist in AI. Here we tested this possibility by optical imaging of AI in guinea pigs. After obtaining tone-evoked activities, we made long-duration optical recordings (9–40 s) and isolated spontaneous activities from respiration and heartbeat noises using independent component analyses. Spontaneous activities were found all over AI, in all animals examined. Of all spontaneous events, 33.6% showed significant correlation in spatio-temporal pattern with tone-evoked activities. Simulation using a model that captures the temporal feature of spontaneous response in single channels but sets no constraint among channels, generated no spontaneous events that resembled tone-evoked activations. These results show the existence of spontaneous events similar in spatio-temporal pattern to tone-evoked activations in AI. Such spontaneous events are likely a manifestation of cortical structures that govern the pattern of distributed activation in AI.