Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex
underlies our perception of sound sources in space remains unclear. Specifically, whether
neurons in auditory cortex represent spatial cues or an integrated representation of auditory
space across cues is not known. Here, we measured the spatial receptive fields of neurons in
primary auditory cortex (A1) while ferrets performed a relative localisation task. Manipulating
the availability of binaural and spectral localisation cues had little impact on ferrets’ performance, or on neural spatial tuning. A subpopulation of neurons encoded spatial position consistently across localisation cue type. Furthermore, neural firing pattern decoders
outperformed two-channel model decoders using population activity. Together, these
observations suggest that A1 encodes the location of sound sources, as opposed to spatial
cue values