Sound discrimination is essential in many species for communicating and foraging. Bats, for example, use sounds for echolocation and communication. In the bat auditory cortex there are neurons that process both sound categories but how these neurons respond to acoustic transitions, i.e. echolocation streams followed by a communication sound, remains unknown. Here, we show that acoustic context -a leading sound sequence followed by a target sound- changes neuronal discriminability of echolocation vs. communication calls in the cortex of awake bats of both sexes. Non-selective neurons that fire equally well to both echolocation and communication calls in the absence of context become category selective when leading context is present. On the contrary, neurons that prefer communication sounds in the absence of context turn into non-selective ones when context is added. The presence of context leads to an overall response suppression, but the strength of this suppression is stimulus-specific: suppression is st...