认知的神经基础研究组
2010
  • 题目:A brain region consisting of neurons with moderate sensitivity for voices
  • 作者:C. Perrodin; C. Kayser; N. K. Logothetis; C. I. Petkov
  • 刊物名称:40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2010)
  • 发表年度:2010
  • DOI:
摘要
A region of voice clusters has recently been identified in the macaque auditory cortex with functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). These clusters show a strong fMRI activity preference for the voice of conspecifics and appear to functionally correspond to those from the known human voice region. In the visual system fMRI has been used to guide electrophysiological recordings from neurons in the monkey brain that were shown to be highly selective for faces [1]. We investigated whether fMRI-guided electrophysiology would reveal comparable levels of selectivity in one of the recently identified monkey voice clusters [2]. During fMRI acquisition and electrophysiological recordings, three categories of 12 sounds were used for stimulation: macaque vocalizations (MVocs), other animal vocalizations (AVocs), and natural sounds (NSnds). The sound categories were comparable in their low-level acoustical features, having been selected for this from a large set of sounds. We first used the stimuli during fMRI, as we have previously done, to identify the clusters with a strong activity preference for MVocs. Then electrophysiological responses to the auditory stimuli were recorded from the anterior voice cluster in two awake macaques (total of 193 responsive single- and multi-units, from 125 sites). Both monkeys showed moderate neuronal response preferences for MVocs over the other sound categories (respectively, 41% and 29% preference for MVocs in the unit activity of each animal), even if the analysis focused on the focal cluster in each animal with maximal selectivity for MVocs (respectively, 72% and 73% preferen