PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Agnès Landemard
AU  - Célian Bimbard
AU  - Charlie Demené
AU  - Shihab Shamma
AU  - Sam Norman-Haignere
AU  - Yves Boubenec
TI  - Distinct higher-order representations of natural sounds in human and ferret auditory cortex
AID  - 10.1101/2020.09.30.321695
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.09.30.321695
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/11/2020.09.30.321695.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/11/2020.09.30.321695.full
AB  - Little is known about how neural representations of natural sounds differ across species. For example, speech and music play a unique role in human hearing, yet it is unclear how auditory representations of speech and music differ between humans and other animals. Using functional Ultrasound imaging, we measured responses in ferrets to a set of natural and spectrotemporally-matched synthetic sounds previously tested in humans. Ferrets showed similar lower-level frequency and modulation tuning to that observed in humans. But while humans showed prominent selectivity for natural vs. synthetic speech and music in non-primary regions, ferret responses to natural and synthetic sounds were closely matched throughout primary and non-primary auditory cortex, even when tested with ferret vocalizations. This finding reveals that auditory representations in humans and ferrets diverge sharply at late stages of cortical processing, potentially driven by higher-order processing demands in speech and music.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.