ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Auditory representation of learned sound sequences in motor regions of the macaque brain.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Auditory contributions to postural and locomotor control: from basic research to clinical applications.Experimental brain research · 2026Review
- Does nonsense make sense? A springboard to studying dynamic reconfiguration of large-scale networks during semantic and intonation speech processing.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Neural representation of sensorimotor features in language-motor areas during auditory and visual perception.Communications biology · 2025Article
- High-resolution fMRI reveals a dorsal brain pathway selective for conspecific vocalizations in macaques.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Psychoacoustic and Archeoacoustic nature of ancient Aztec skull whistles.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Dog-human vocal interactions match dogs' sensory-motor tuning.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Evolutionary continuity and divergence of auditory dorsal and ventral pathways in primates revealed by ultra-high field diffusion MRI.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Anatomy of the auditory cortex then and now.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2023Review
- The relevance of the unique anatomy of the human prefrontal operculum to the emergence of speech.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Auditory cortical connectivity in humans.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Beyond Broca: neural architecture and evolution of a dual motor speech coordination system.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2023Article
- Article
- Evidence for a Spoken Word Lexicon in the Auditory Ventral Stream.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Socially meaningful visual context either enhances or inhibits vocalisation processing in the macaque brain.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Reorganization of the Neurobiology of Language After Sentence Overlearning.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Flexible auditory training, psychophysics, and enrichment of common marmosets with an automated, touchscreen-based system.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Motor constellation theory: A model of infants' phonological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Human speech production requires the ability to couple motor actions with their auditory consequences. Nonhuman primates might not have speech because they lack this ability. To address this question, we trained macaques to perform an auditory-motor task producing sound sequences via hand presses on a newly designed device ("monkey piano"). Catch trials were interspersed to ascertain the monkeys were listening to the sounds they produced. Functional MRI was then used to map brain activity while the animals listened attentively to the sound sequences they had learned to produce and to two control sequences, which were either completely unfamiliar or familiar through passive exposure only. All sounds activated auditory midbrain and cortex, but listening to the sequences that were learned by self-production additionally activated the putamen and the hand and arm regions of motor cortex. These results indicate that, in principle, monkeys are capable of forming internal models linking sound perception and production in motor regions of the brain, so this ability is not special to speech in humans. However, the coupling of sounds and actions in nonhuman primates (and the availability of an internal model supporting it) seems not to extend to the upper vocal tract, that is, the supralaryngeal articulators, which are key for the production of speech sounds in humans. The origin of speech may have required the evolution of a "command apparatus" similar to the control of the hand, which was crucial for the evolution of tool use.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.