Learning can induce neurophysiological plasticity in the auditory cortex at multiple timescales. Lasting changes to auditory cortical function that persist over days, weeks, or even a lifetime, require learning to induce de novo gene expression.

Indeed, transcription is the molecular determinant for long-term memories to form with a lasting impact on sound-related behavior.

However, auditory cortical genes that support auditory learning, memory, and acquired sound-specific behavior are largely unknown. Using an animal model of adult, male Sprague-Dawley rats, this report is the first to identify genome-wide changes in learning-induced gene expression within the auditory cortex that may underlie long-lasting discriminative memory formation of acoustic frequency cues.

Auditory cortical samples were collected from animals in the initial learning phase of a two-tone discrimination sound-reward task known to induce sound-specific neurophysiological and behavioral effects.