After perceptual learning, a subset of neurons in the auditory cortex increased their responses during a “difficult” perceptual task.

This didn’t happen during an “easy” version of the task.

The effect was also task dependent; didn’t happen during passive viewing.

Cool results!

Though I don’t quite understand why the authors framed this as a signature of task difficulty. It looks like a learned strategy to handle the more difficult conditions, but why would we call it a signature of task difficulty?

Link to the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adp9816