Correlates of auditory decision making in prefrontal, auditory, and basal lateral amygdala cortical areas

Auditory selective listening and decision making underlies important processes, including attending to a single speaker in a crowded room, often referred to as the cocktail party problem. To examine the neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors, we developed a novel auditory selective listening paradigm for monkeys. In this task, monkeys had to detect a difficult to discriminate target embedded in noise when presented in a pre-cued location (either left or right) and ignore it if it was in the opposite location. While the animals carried out the task we recorded neural activity in primary auditory cortex (AC), dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the basal lateral amygdala (BLA), given that these areas have been implicated in auditory decision making, selective listing, and/or reward-guided decision making. There were two main findings in the neural data. First, primary AC encoded the side of the cue and target, and the monkey’s choice, before either dlPFC or the amygdala. The BLA encoded cue and target variables negligibly, but was engaged at the time of the monkey’s choice. Second, decoding analyses suggested that errors followed primarily from a failure to encode the target stimulus in both AC and PFC, but earlier in AC. Thus, AC neural activity is poised to represent the sensory volley and decision making during selective listening before dlPFC, and they both precede activity in BLA.