How do auditory cortex neurons represent communication sounds?
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- 作者：Quentin Gaucher ; Chlo茅 Huetz ; Boris Gour茅vitch ; Jonathan Laudanski ; Florian Occelli ; Jean-Marc Edeline
- 关键词：ACx ; auditory cortex ; AI ; primary auditory cortex ; CL ; caudo-lateral area of the monkey auditory cortex ; CM ; caudo-medial area of the monkey auditory cortex ; EPSP ; excitatory post-synaptic potential ; GBZ ; gabazine ; HPC ; High probability connection ; HVC ; high vocal center ; LPC ; low probability connection ; ML ; middle lateral of the monkey auditory cortex ; MLd ; mesencephalicus lateralis dorsalis ; STRF ; spectro-temporal receptive field ; rMTF ; rate Modulation Transfer Function ; R ; rostral area of the
- 刊名：Hearing Research
- 出版年：November, 2013
- 年：2013
- 卷：305
- 期：Complete
- 页码：102-112
- 全文大小：1646 K
文摘
A major goal in auditory neuroscience is to characterize how communication sounds are represented at the cortical level. The present review aims at investigating the role of auditory cortex in the processing of speech, bird songs and other vocalizations, which all are spectrally and temporally highly structured sounds. Whereas earlier studies have simply looked for neurons exhibiting higher firing rates to particular conspecific vocalizations over their modified, artificially synthesized versions, more recent studies determined the coding capacity of temporal spike patterns, which are prominent in primary and non-primary areas (and also in non-auditory cortical areas). In several cases, this information seems to be correlated with the behavioral performance of human or animal subjects, suggesting that聽spike-timing based coding strategies might set the foundations of our perceptive abilities. Also, it is now clear that the responses of auditory cortex neurons are highly nonlinear and that their responses to natural stimuli cannot be predicted from their responses to artificial stimuli such as moving ripples and broadband noises. Since auditory cortex neurons cannot follow rapid fluctuations of the vocalizations envelope, they only respond at specific time points during communication sounds, which can serve as temporal markers for integrating the temporal and spectral processing taking place at subcortical relays. Thus, the temporal sparse code of auditory cortex neurons can be considered as a first step for generating high level representations of communication sounds independent of the acoustic characteristic of these sounds.
This article is part of a Special Issue entitled 鈥淐ommunication Sounds and the Brain: New Directions and Perspectives鈥?/em>.