ArticleThe European journal of neuroscience2015
Meaning in the avian auditory cortex: neural representation of communication calls.
Article in The European journal of neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Organization, neuronal composition, and dynamics of neuronal ensembles in the songbird auditory forebrain.iScience · 2026Article
- Article
- Categorical and semantic perception of the meaning of call types in zebra finches.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Context-dependent modulations in zebra finch distance calls revealed by a novel goal-directed vocalization paradigm.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A Complex Acoustical Environment During Development Enhances Auditory Perception and Coding Efficiency in the Zebra Finch.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- A complex acoustical environment during development enhances auditory perception and coding efficiency in the zebra finch.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Adult auditory brain responses to nestling begging calls in seasonal songbirds: an fMRI study in non-parenting male and female starlings (Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Dynamic encoding of phonetic categories in zebra finch auditory forebrain.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A researcher's guide to the comparative assessment of vocal production learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Distinct timescales for the neuronal encoding of vocal signals in a high-order auditory area.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- High-capacity auditory memory for vocal communication in a social songbird.Science advances · 2020Article
- Neurotelemetry Reveals Putative Predictive Activity in HVC during Call-Based Vocal Communications in Zebra Finches.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Life-Stage Dependent Plasticity in the Auditory System of a Songbird Is Signal and Emitter-Specific.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
- Auditory processing in the zebra finch midbrain: single unit responses and effect of rearing experience.PeerJ · 2020Article
- Invariant neural responses for sensory categories revealed by the time-varying information for communication calls.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Regularities in zebra finch song beyond the repeated motif.Behavioural processes · 2019Article
- A low-threshold potassium current enhances sparseness and reliability in a model of avian auditory cortex.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Efficient Neural Coding in Auditory and Speech Perception.Trends in neurosciences · 2019Review
- Acoustic fine structure may encode biologically relevant information for zebra finches.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Individual recognition of opposite sex vocalizations in the zebra finch.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding how the brain extracts the behavioral meaning carried by specific vocalization types that can be emitted by various vocalizers and in different conditions is a central question in auditory research. This semantic categorization is a fundamental process required for acoustic communication, and presupposes discriminative and invariance properties of the auditory system for conspecific vocalizations. Songbirds have been used extensively to study vocal learning, but the communicative function of all their vocalizations and their neural representation has yet to be examined. In this study, we first generated a library containing almost the entire zebra finch vocal repertoire, and organised communication calls along nine different categories according to their behavioral meaning. We then investigated the neural representations of these semantic categories in the primary and secondary auditory areas of six anesthetised zebra finches. To analyse how single units encode these call categories, we described neural responses in terms of their discrimination, selectivity and invariance properties. Quantitative measures for these neural properties were obtained with an optimal decoder using both spike counts and spike patterns. Information theoretic metrics show that almost half of the single units encode semantic information. Neurons achieve higher discrimination of these semantic categories by being more selective and more invariant. These results demonstrate that computations necessary for semantic categorization of meaningful vocalizations are already present in the auditory cortex, and emphasise the value of a neuro-ethological approach to understand vocal communication.
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