RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Distinct higher-order representations of natural sounds in human and ferret auditory cortex
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.09.30.321695
DO 10.1101/2020.09.30.321695
A1 Landemard, Agnès
A1 Bimbard, Célian
A1 Demené, Charlie
A1 Shamma, Shihab
A1 Norman-Haignere, Sam
A1 Boubenec, Yves
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/11/2020.09.30.321695.abstract
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.