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Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical
Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 720 Rutland
Avenue, Ross 424, Baltimore, MD 21205
Understanding how the brain processes vocal communication sounds is
one of the most challenging problems in neuroscience. Our understanding
of how the cortex accomplishes this unique task should greatly
facilitate our understanding of cortical mechanisms in general.
Perception of species-specific communication sounds is an important
aspect of the auditory behavior of many animal species and is crucial
for their social interactions, reproductive success, and survival. The
principles of neural representations of these behaviorally important
sounds in the cerebral cortex have direct implications for the neural
mechanisms underlying human speech perception. Our progress in this
area has been relatively slow, compared with our understanding of other
auditory functions such as echolocation and sound localization. This
article discusses previous and current studies in this field, with
emphasis on nonhuman primates, and proposes a conceptual platform to
further our exploration of this frontier. It is argued that the
prerequisite condition for understanding cortical mechanisms underlying
communication sound perception and production is an appropriate animal
model. Three issues are central to this work: (i)
neural encoding of statistical structure of communication sounds,
(ii) the role of behavioral relevance in shaping
cortical representations, and (iii) sensory-motor
interactions between vocal production and perception systems.
Colloquium Paper
On cortical coding of vocal communication sounds in primates
*
E-mail: xwang{at}bme.jhu.edu.
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