Lixia Gao’s group published in National Science Review on neural representation of conspecific vocalizations in amygdala of awake marmosets
The research team led by Prof. Lixia Gao has recently published an article titled Representation of conspecific vocalizations in amygdala of awake marmoset in National Science Review on Jul 13th, Beijing time. This research uncovered a novel role of amygdala in representing a critical stage of socially relevant auditory perception.
Human speech and animal vocalizations are important for social communication and animal survival. Neurons in the auditory pathway are responsive to a range of sounds, from elementary sound features to complex objects such as voices. For social communication, responses to distinct patterns of vocalization are usually highly specific to an individual conspecific call, in some species. This includes the specificity of sound patterns and embedded biological information. Authors conducted single-unit recordings in the amygdala of awake marmosets and presented calls used in marmoset communication, calls of other species and calls from specific marmoset individuals. They found that some neurons in the amygdala distinguished ‘Phee’ calls from vocalizations of other animals and other types of marmoset vocalizations. Interestingly, a subset of Phee-responsive neurons also exhibited selectivity to one out of the three Phees from two different ‘caller’ marmosets. Their findings suggest that, while it has traditionally been considered the key structure in the limbic system, the amygdala also represents a critical stage of socially relevant auditory perceptual processing.
Prof. Lixia Gao from Zhejiang University School of Medicine is the main corresponding author. Prof. Xinjian Li from Department of Neurology of Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, is co-corresponding author. Dr. Guoqiang Jia is the first author. This work was supported by Science and Technology Innovation 2030 - ‘Research on Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence’ (2021ZD0204101, China), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32170991, 32071097 and 31871056), Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (LD22H090003), MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science and Brain-Machine Integration (Zhejiang University) and Project funded by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2023M733097).
