Noise-invariant representations of sound emerge along the canonical cortical hierarchy

Neurons in the auditory system must represent behaviorally relevant sounds in the presence of background noise (BN) to support noise-invariant perception and behavior. Although the primary auditory cortex (ACtx) has been implicated in constructing noise-invariant representations, it remains unclear which excitatory subpopulations within ACtx carry out this transformation from noise-dependent to noise-invariant coding. To address this, we presented pure tones with and without continuous BN to head-fixed mice and used two-photon calcium imaging to record sound-evoked activity from three major excitatory subpopulations in ACtx: layer (L)2/3 intratelencephalic (IT) neurons, L5 IT neurons, and L5 extratelencephalic (ET) neurons. L2/3 IT neurons exhibited strong noise dependence at the level of single-neuron responses, pairwise interactions, and population representations. In contrast, deep-layer pathways showed greater noise invariance, with L5 IT neurons preserving stable representations most consistently and L5 ET neurons exhibiting more limited invariance at the population level. These findings reveal a functional division of labor in ACtx, in which superficial neurons remain noise-dependent and deep-layer broadcast pathways, particularly L5 IT, preferentially carry noise-invariant representations, suggesting that excitatory subpopulations contribute differentially to the construction and propagation of noise-invariant codes.