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Perception can be highly dependent on stimulus context, but whether and how sensory areas encode the context remains uncertain. We used an ambiguous auditory stimulus - a tritone pair - to investigate the neural activity associated with a preceding contextual stimulus that strongly influenced the tritone pair’s perception: either as an ascending or a descending step in pitch.

We recorded single-unit responses from a population of auditory cortical cells in awake ferrets listening to the tritone pairs preceded by the contextual stimulus. We find that the responses adapt locally to the contextual stimulus, consistent with human MEG recordings from the auditory cortex under the same conditions. Decoding the population responses demonstrates that cells responding to pitch-class-changes are able to predict well the context-sensitive percept of the tritone pairs. Conversely, decoding the individual pitch-class representations and taking their distance in the circular Shepard tone space predicts theoppositeof the percept. The various percepts can be readily captured and explained by a neural model of cortical activity based on populations of adapting, pitch-class and pitch-class-direction cells, aligned with the neurophysiological responses.

Together, these decoding and model results suggest that contextual influences on perception may well be already encoded at the level of the primary sensory cortices, reflecting basic neural response properties commonly found in these areas.