Neuronal responses in cat primary auditory cortex to natural and altered species-specific calls

Gehr, Daniel D.; Komiya, Hisashi; Eggermont, Jos J.

doi:10.1016/s0378-5955(00)00170-2

Cited by 86 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…In the cat auditory cortex, kitten meow evoked responses were found in a number of multi-unit records. However, responses in general were stronger to low-or high-frequency harmonics of the natural call than to the call, itself [30]. In squirrel monkeys, the species-specific isolation call evokes responses from single units in the auditory cortex.…”

Section: Crying In the Ear Of The Beholder: The Perceptual Side Of Thmentioning

confidence: 87%

Neural circuits underlying crying and cry responding in mammals

Newman

2007

Behavioural Brain Research

182

132

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Crying is a universal vocalization in human infants, as well as in the infants of other mammals. Little is known about the neural structures underlying cry production, or the circuitry that mediates a caregiver's response to cry sounds. In this review, the specific structures known or suspected to be involved in this circuit are identified, along with neurochemical systems and hormones for which evidence suggests a role in responding to infants and infant cries. In addition, evidence that crying elicits parental responses in different mammals is presented. An argument is made for including 'crying' as a functional category in the vocal repertoire of all mammalian infants (and the adults of some species). The prevailing neural model for crying production considers forebrain structures to be dispensable. However, evidence for the anterior cingulate gyrus in cry production, and this structure along with the amygdala and some other forebrain areas in responding to cries is presented.

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Section: Crying In the Ear Of The Beholder: The Perceptual Side Of Thmentioning

confidence: 87%

Neural circuits underlying crying and cry responding in mammals

Newman

2007

Behavioural Brain Research

182

132

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“…Selectivity for the natural variants of conspecific vocalizations has been reported in the auditory cortex (Gehr et al, 2000;Wang and Kadia, 2001;Grace et al, 2003;Wang et al, 2005;Amin et al, 2007) and the IC (Pincherli Castellanos et al, 2007) of mammals and birds. Contradictory results have been reported, however, in both the auditory thalamus (Philibert et al, 2005;Huetz et al, 2009) and the IC (Suta et al, 2003) using anesthetized animals.…”

Section: Heterogeneous Response Properties In the Icmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Encoding of Vocalizations in the Auditory Midbrain

Holmstrom¹,

Eeuwes²,

Roberts³

et al. 2010

J. Neurosci.

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An important question in sensory neuroscience is what coding strategies and mechanisms are used by the brain to detect and discriminate among behaviorally relevant stimuli. There is evidence that sensory systems migrate from a distributed and redundant encoding strategy at the periphery to a more heterogeneous encoding in cortical structures. It has been hypothesized that heterogeneity is an efficient encoding strategy that minimizes the redundancy of the neural code and maximizes information throughput. Evidence of this mechanism has been documented in cortical structures. In this study, we examined whether heterogeneous encoding of complex sounds contributes to efficient encoding in the auditory midbrain by characterizing neural responses to behaviorally relevant vocalizations in the mouse inferior colliculus (IC). We independently manipulated the frequency, amplitude, duration, and harmonic structure of the vocalizations to create a suite of modified vocalizations. Based on measures of both spike rate and timing, we characterized the heterogeneity of neural responses to the natural vocalizations and their perturbed variants. Using information theoretic measures, we found that heterogeneous response properties of IC neurons contribute to efficient encoding of behaviorally relevant vocalizations.

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“…This is not the case for neurons recorded in the cat ACx (Wang and Kadia, 2001). The preference for natural versions of conspecific vocalizations over their time-reversed versions is not observed in either the squirrel monkey ACx (Glass and Wollberg, 1983a,b;Pelleg-Toiba and Wollberg, 1991) or cat ACx (Gehr et al, 2000). This discrepancy may depend on several factors, such as the species, type of natural stimuli, and potential sample bias of the type of cortical cells recorded.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

A Spike-Timing Code for Discriminating Conspecific Vocalizations in the Thalamocortical System of Anesthetized and Awake Guinea Pigs

Huetz¹,

Philibert²,

Edeline³

2009

J. Neurosci.

103

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Understanding how communication sounds are processed and encoded in the central auditory system is critical to understanding the neural bases of acoustic communication. Here, we examined neuronal representations of species-specific vocalizations, which are communication sounds that many species rely on for survival and social interaction. In some species, the evoked responses of auditory cortex neurons are stronger in response to natural conspecific vocalizations than to their time-reversed, spectrally identical, counterparts. We applied information theory-based analyses to single-unit spike trains collected in the auditory cortex (n ϭ 139) and auditory thalamus (n ϭ 135) of anesthetized animals as well as in the auditory cortex (n ϭ 119) of awake guinea pigs during presentation of four conspecific vocalizations. Few thalamic and cortical cells (Ͻ10%) displayed a firing rate preference for the natural version of these vocalizations. In contrast, when the information transmitted by the spike trains was quantified with a temporal precision of 10 -50 ms, many cells (Ͼ75%) displayed a significant amount of information (i.e., Ͼ2SD above chance levels), especially in the awake condition. The computed correlation index between spike trains (R corr , defined by Schreiber et al., 2003) indicated similar spike-timing reliability for both the natural and time-reversed versions of each vocalization, but higher reliability for awake animals compared with anesthetized animals. Based on temporal discharge patterns, even cells that were only weakly responsive to vocalizations displayed a significant level of information. These findings emphasize the importance of temporal discharge patterns as a coding mechanism for natural communication sounds, particularly in awake animals.

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Neuronal responses in cat primary auditory cortex to natural and altered species-specific calls

Cited by 86 publications

References 21 publications

Neural circuits underlying crying and cry responding in mammals

Neural circuits underlying crying and cry responding in mammals

Efficient Encoding of Vocalizations in the Auditory Midbrain

A Spike-Timing Code for Discriminating Conspecific Vocalizations in the Thalamocortical System of Anesthetized and Awake Guinea Pigs

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