Task-specific invariant representation in auditory cortex

Categorical sensory representations are critical for many behaviors, including speech perception. In the auditory system, categorical information is thought to arise hierarchically, becoming increasingly prominent in higher order cortical regions. The neural mechanisms that support this robust and flexible computation remain poorly understood. Here, we studied sound representations in primary and non-primary auditory cortex while animals engaged in a challenging sound discrimination task. Population-level decoding of simultaneously recorded single neurons revealed that task engagement caused categorical sound representations to emerge in non-primary auditory cortex. In primary auditory cortex, task engagement caused a general enhancement of sound decoding that was not specific to task-relevant categories. These findings are consistent with mixed selectivity models of neural disentanglement, in which early sensory regions build an overcomplete representation of the world and allow neuron..., Neural spiking activity was recorded from the auditory cortex of ferrets while animals engaged in an auditory detection task. Data was acquired using laminar silicon multi-electrode arrays acutely inserted into the auditory cortex region of interest (A1 or dPEG). Raw data was spike sorted using Kilosort2, followed by manual curation in Phy. For details on the spike sorting procedure or on the experimental set up in general, please refer to the associated eLife manuscript.
For the purposes of sharing this data, we have included the post-spike sorted data for all electrophysiology experiments discretized into spike counts at 10 Hz and 50 Hz sampling, as these were the two views of the data we used to generate all analyses in the manuscript. These data were saved using the NEMS recording object format which can be easily loaded and manipulated in Python using the NEMS library (https://github.com/LBHB/NEMS). These recording objects contain additional information about the animal's behavior ..., , # Data from: Task-specific invariant representation in auditory cortex
[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z08kprrp4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z08kprrp4)

In this study, we trained ferrets to perform a go/no-go tone-in-noise detection task. After animals learned the task, we acutely inserted laminar 64-channel electrodes into the auditory cortex and recorded population spiking activity while animals performed the task. We have included the spike-sorted, binned spike count neural activity for every experiment in addition to trial-by-trial information about the animal's behavior. In addition, we have included the results of our neural data analysis which are presented in our manuscript.

## Description of the data and file structure

**\"Raw\" data files:**

* Neural data
* Neural data are saved separately for each experiment e.g.,: `recordings/ARM007c_a544dd863127bc5f0e01f9656c91aa11e63cc806.tgz` corresponds to the data from one experiment.
* These `.tgz` files are cached versions of `...