<p>by Yuying Zhai, Peirun Song, Ana Belén Lao-Rodríguez, Xinyu Du, Haoxuan Xu, Hangting Ye, Xuehui Bao, Ishrat Mehmood, Nayaab Shahir Pandit, Cheng Chang, Zhouyou Dai, Zhiyi Tu, Pei Chen, Tingting Zhang, Lingling Zhang, Xuan Zhao, David Pérez-González, Manuel S. Malmierca, Xiongjie Yu</p> Natural sounds are shaped by both spectral content and temporal patterning. Here we ask whether click trains with the same mean inter-click interval, but different millisecond-scale temporal patterns evoke distinct behavioral and neural responses. Human listeners discriminated several such click-train patterns, and human EEG revealed context-dependent deviance-related responses. Awake rats showed analogous cortical response differences at the ECoG level. Along the IC–MGB–A1 pathway, unit recordings revealed weak oddball/context sensitivity in IC, intermediate sensitivity in MGB, and stronger stimulus-specific adaptation in A1. Reversible inactivation of the auditory cortex reduced MGB sensitivity, indicating a contribution of corticothalamic feedback. Further A1 layer analyses showed stronger effects in supragranular than deep cortical layers. Together, these results show that distinct click-train temporal patterns are differentially represented across the auditory system, with stronger sensitivity emerging in higher auditory structures.