During critical periods, neural circuits develop to form receptive fields that adapt to the sensory environment and enable optimal performance of relevant tasks. We hypothesized that early exposure to background noise can improve signal-in-noise processing, and the resulting receptive field plasticity in the primary auditory cortex can reveal functional principles guiding that important task. We raised rat pups in different spectro-temporal noise statistics during their auditory critical period. As adults, they showed enhanced behavioral performance in detecting vocalizations in noise. Concomitantly, encoding of vocalizations in noise in the primary auditory cortex improves with noise-rearing. Significantly, spectro-temporal modulation plasticity shifts cortical preferences away from the exposed noise statistics, thus reducing noise interference with the foreground sound representation. Auditory cortical plasticity shapes receptive field preferences to optimally extract foreground information in noisy environments during noise-rearing. Early noise exposure induces cortical circuits to implement efficient coding in the joint spectral and temporal modulation domain.

在关键时期，神经回路发育形成适应感觉环境并能使相关任务最佳执行的感受野。我们假设尽早暴露于背景噪声可以改善信噪比处理，并且初级听觉皮层中产生的感受野可塑性可以揭示指导这一重要任务的功能原理。在听觉关键时期，我们用不同的光谱-时间噪声统计数据提出了幼崽。作为成年人，他们在检测噪声中的发声方面表现出增强的行为表现。伴随地，随着噪声的增加，初级听觉皮层中的声音中发声的编码得以改善。值得注意的是，光谱-时间调制可塑性将皮层偏好从暴露的噪声统计数据转移开来，从而减少了对前景声音表示的干扰。听觉皮层可塑性塑造了接收场的偏好，从而在嘈杂环境中的嘈杂环境中最佳地提取了前景信息。早期的噪声暴露促使皮质电路在联合频谱和时间调制域中实现高效编码。