Auditory network persistence of stimulus representation in awake and naturally sleeping mice

Persistent neural activity often outlasts sensory stimulation, forming a bridge between perception and action. Such activity has been associated commonly with working memory, decision making, and action preparation under active task conditions. However, its existence and characteristics during passive states and sleep remain understudied. Using chronic high-density electrophysiology in freely behaving mice, we show that persistent population spiking activity in the mouse auditory cortical hierarchy enables decoding of past stimuli after their physical offset, during both wakefulness and natural sleep. Using time-resolved decoding, we demonstrate that in wakefulness, persistent representation decays uniformly across early sensory and association cortices. In contrast, sleep is associated with longer persistent stimulus representation in association cortex, while early auditory regions maintain shorter wake-like dynamics. These results reveal how the brain maintains sensory information across behavioral states and establish that persistent representation is a passive and state-dependent feature of sensory processing. Persistent activity in mouse auditory cortex allows time-resolved decoding of past sounds after stimulus offset during wakefulness and sleep. Sleep prolongs decodable representations in association cortex, revealing state-dependent sensory memory.