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High responsiveness of auditory neurons to specific combination of acoustic features in female songbirds
Author(s) -
Inda Masahiro,
Hotta Kohji,
Oka Kotaro
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.15047
Subject(s) - songbird , taeniopygia , zebra finch , auditory perception , perception , biology , speech recognition , audiology , acoustics , psychology , neuroscience , computer science , medicine , physics , paleontology
Zebra finch ( Taeniopygia guttata ) is a songbird species in which males sing their unique songs to attract females who then select their preferred male. Acoustic features in the songs of individual males are important features for female auditory perception. While the male of this species is a classic model of vocal production, it has been little known about auditory processing in female. In the higher auditory brain regions, the caudomedial mesopallium (CMM) and nidopallium (NCM) contribute to female's sound recognition, we, therefore, extracted acoustic features that induce neural activities with high detection power on both regions in female finches. A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that neurons were sensitive to mean frequency and Wiener entropy. In addition, we performed an experiment with modified artificial songs and harmonic songs to directly investigate neural responsiveness for deriving further evidence for the contribution of these two acoustic features. Finally, we illustrated a specific ratio combining these two acoustic features that showed highest sensitivity to neural responsiveness, and we found that properties of sensitivity are different between CMM and NCM. Our results indicate that the mixture of the two acoustic features with the specific ratio is important in the higher auditory regions of female songbirds, and these two regions have differences in encoding for sensitivity to these acoustic features.

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