Fig. 3: Social exposure-induced auditory cortex plasticity correlates with the rate of task acquisition.

a Raster and PSTH of example AC cell to Go and Nogo stimuli during social exposure. b Firing rate of single- and multi-units to modulated AM portions of stimuli (central line: median, bottom and top edges: 25th and 75th percentiles, whiskers: minimum and maximum points). Significant increases in FR from early to late exposure to practice were observed for both groups. c For both groups, the coefficient of variation (CV) of single and multi-units decreased significantly from early to late exposure to practice. d For both groups, vector strength (VS) of single and multi-units improved significantly from early to late exposure, and for non-social exposure animals only, VS also increased from late exposure to practice. See text for statistics (Steel–Dwass comparisons, two-sided). e Schematic of spike pattern classifier analysis to calculate neural d′ values for single units. f Neural d′ of AC single-units: social observers displayed a significant increase from early to late exposure, but non-social exposure animals did not (Steel–Dwass comparisons, two-sided). g Mean neural d′ are plotted for a subset of putatively same single-units held from early to late exposure. Significant group differences are found with exposure (Likelihood ratio Chi-square, p = 0.0006). h Significant correlation between the difference in median neural d′ from early to late exposure of all single units for each animal and the number of practice days required for the given animal to perform at criterion d′. Significant differences were observed between the two groups in terms of number of practice days to reach criterion d′ (Wilcoxon rank sum test, two-sided, X²(1) = 6.79, p = 0.009) and median neural d′ change during exposure (X²(1) = 6.56, p = 0.011).