( c) When the ferret is engaged in these tasks, the coherence between local field potentials (LFP) recorded simultaneously in A1 and in the frontal cortex (FC) was strongly depressed. ( b) An example of a neuron in the ferret frontal cortex that responded vigorously to a target tone during a task in which that stimulus had to be discriminated from several reference sounds no response was elicited by the same stimulus sequence presented before behavior. ( a) A tangential-flattened section of the ferret brain. Top-down relationship between frontal and auditory cortices. In this issue, Fritz and colleagues 3 reveal more about this relationship, finding that neuronal activity in the frontal cortex of ferrets encodes the behavioral meaning of acoustic stimuli and that the coupling between these neurons and the region of auditory cortex that represents the target sounds changes during sound detection or discrimination tasks. The classic example of these top-down effects is provided by the relationship between prefrontal and sensory cortices ( Fig. Top-down signals are believed to endow sensory inputs with meaning and they allow attention to be directed toward particular stimulus features. This involves an interaction between top-down and bottom-up signals in the brain. Our perception of the world therefore critically depends on the capacity of the brain to adapt rapidly to changes in incoming sounds 1 and to focus attention toward sounds of interest 2. Our auditory scene constantly changes as voices and other sounds come and go and as we move from one setting to another that may differ greatly in its acoustical properties.

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