Animal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well-known example of birdsong, other animals such as insects, amphibians, and mammals (including bats, rodents, primates, and cetaceans) also generate complex acoustic sequences. Occasionally, such as with birdsong, the adaptive role of these sequences seems clear (e.g. mate attraction and territorial defence). More often however, researchers have only begun to characterise – let alone understand – the significance and meaning of acoustic sequences. Hypotheses abound, but there is little agreement as to how sequences should be defined and analysed. Our review aims to outline suitable methods for testing these hypotheses, and to describe the major limitations to our current and near-future knowledge on questions of acoustic sequences. This review and prospectus is the result of a collaborative effort between 43 scientists from the fields of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution, signal processing, machine learning, quantitative linguistics, and information theory, who gathered for a 2013 workshop entitled, “Analysing vocal sequences in animals”. Our goal is to present not just a review of the state of the art, but to propose a methodological framework that summarises what we suggest are the best practices for research in this field, across taxa and across disciplines. We also provide a tutorial-style introduction to some of the most promising algorithmic approaches for analysing sequences. We divide our review into three sections: identifying the distinct units of an acoustic sequence, describing the different ways that information can be contained within a sequence, and analysing the structure of that sequence. Each of these sections is further subdivided to address the key questions and approaches in that area. We propose a uniform, systematic, and comprehensive approach to studying sequences, with the goal of clarifying research terms used in different fields, and facilitating collaboration and comparative studies. Allowing greater interdisciplinary collaboration will facilitate the investigation of many important questions in the evolution of communication and sociality.

Understanding how communication sounds are processed and encoded in the central auditory system is critical to understanding the neural bases of acoustic communication. Here, we examined neuronal representations of species-specific vocalizations, which are communication sounds that many species rely on for survival and social interaction. In some species, the evoked responses of auditory cortex neurons are stronger in response to natural conspecific vocalizations than to their time-reversed, spectrally identical, counterparts. We applied information theory-based analyses to single-unit spike trains collected in the auditory cortex (n ϭ 139) and auditory thalamus (n ϭ 135) of anesthetized animals as well as in the auditory cortex (n ϭ 119) of awake guinea pigs during presentation of four conspecific vocalizations. Few thalamic and cortical cells (Ͻ10%) displayed a firing rate preference for the natural version of these vocalizations. In contrast, when the information transmitted by the spike trains was quantified with a temporal precision of 10 -50 ms, many cells (Ͼ75%) displayed a significant amount of information (i.e., Ͼ2SD above chance levels), especially in the awake condition. The computed correlation index between spike trains (R corr , defined by Schreiber et al., 2003) indicated similar spike-timing reliability for both the natural and time-reversed versions of each vocalization, but higher reliability for awake animals compared with anesthetized animals. Based on temporal discharge patterns, even cells that were only weakly responsive to vocalizations displayed a significant level of information. These findings emphasize the importance of temporal discharge patterns as a coding mechanism for natural communication sounds, particularly in awake animals.

In all sensory modalities, intracortical inhibition shapes the functional properties of cortical neurons but also influences the responses to natural stimuli. Studies performed in various species have revealed that auditory cortex neurons respond to conspecific vocalizations by temporal spike patterns displaying a high trial-to-trial reliability, which might result from precise timing between excitation and inhibition. Studying the guinea pig auditory cortex, we show that partial blockage of GABA A receptors by gabazine (GBZ) application (10 M, a concentration that promotes expansion of cortical receptive fields) increased the evoked firing rate and the spike-timing reliability during presentation of communication sounds (conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations), whereas GABA B receptor antagonists [10 M saclofen; 10 -50 M CGP55845 (p-3-aminopropyl-p-diethoxymethyl phosphoric acid)] had nonsignificant effects. Computing mutual information (MI) from the responses to vocalizations using either the evoked firing rate or the temporal spike patterns revealed that GBZ application increased the MI derived from the activity of single cortical site but did not change the MI derived from population activity. In addition, quantification of information redundancy showed that GBZ significantly increased redundancy at the population level. This result suggests that a potential role of intracortical inhibition is to reduce information redundancy during the processing of natural stimuli.

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Cotillon-Williams N, Huetz C, Hennevin E, Edeline J-M. Tonotopic control of auditory thalamus frequency tuning by reticular thalamic neurons. J Neurophysiol 99: 1137-1151, 2008. First published December 26, 2007 doi:10.1152/jn.01159.2007. GABAergic cells of the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) can potentially exert strong control over transmission of information through thalamus to the cerebral cortex. Anatomical studies have shown that the reticulothalamic connections are spatially organized in the visual, somatosensory, and auditory systems. However, the issue of how inhibitory input from TRN controls the functional properties of thalamic relay cells and whether this control follows topographic rules remains largely unknown. Here we assessed the consequences of increasing or decreasing the activity of small ensembles of TRN neurons on the receptive field properties of medial geniculate (MG) neurons. For each MG cell, the frequency tuning curve and the rate-level function were tested before, during, and after microiontophoretic applications of GABA, or of glutamate, in the auditory sector of the TRN. For 66 MG cells tested during potent pharmacological control of TRN activity, group data did not reveal any significant effects. However, for a population of 20/66 cells (all but 1 recorded in the ventral, tonotopic, division), the breadth of tuning, the frequency selectivity and the acoustic threshold were significantly modified in the directions expected from removing, or reinforcing, a dominant inhibitory input onto MG cells. Such effects occurred only when the distance between the characteristic frequency of the recorded ventral MG cell and that of the TRN cells at the ejection site was Ͻ0.25 octaves; they never occurred for larger distances. This relationship indicates that the functional interactions between TRN cells and ventral MG cells rely on precise topographic connections. I N T R O D U C T I O NThe thalamus is often considered as a "gate" for the transfer of information to neocortex. Understanding the key factors controlling this gate has been the subject of intense research, but several points remain unresolved. The reticular nucleus of the thalamus (TRN) has a key anatomical position and chemical composition to modulate thalamocortical activity. It receives inputs from both thalamus and cortex and sends outputs back to the thalamus (Jones 1975). Exclusively composed of GABAergic neurons (Arcelli et al. 1997; Benson et al. 1991;Houser et al. 1980), it is a major source of inhibition for all thalamic nuclei . In some species and for some sensory modalities, it is the quasi-exclusive source of inhibition in the thalamus, whereas in others it shares this role with local inhibitory interneurons (reviewed in Jones 1985; Sherman and Guillery 2001). The lateral geniculate nucleus possesses around 20% of inhibitory interneurons in all species (Barbaresi et al. 1986; Benson et al. 1992). The somatosensory thalamus and the auditory thalamus possess 20 -25% of inhibitory interneurons in primate and cat (Benson e...

Humans and animals maintain accurate sound discrimination in the presence of loud sources of background noise. It is commonly assumed that this ability relies on the robustness of auditory cortex responses. However, only a few attempts have been made to characterize neural discrimination of communication sounds masked by noise at each stage of the auditory system and to quantify the noise effects on the neuronal discrimination in terms of alterations in amplitude modulations. Here, we measured neural discrimination between communication sounds masked by a vocalization-shaped stationary noise from multiunit responses recorded in the cochlear nucleus, inferior colliculus, auditory thalamus, and primary and secondary auditory cortex at several signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in anesthetized male or female guinea pigs. Masking noise decreased sound discrimination of neuronal populations in each auditory structure, but collicular and thalamic populations showed better performance than cortical populations at each SNR. In contrast, in each auditory structure, discrimination by neuronal populations was slightly decreased when tone-vocoded vocalizations were tested. These results shed new light on the specific contributions of subcortical structures to robust sound encoding, and suggest that the distortion of slow amplitude modulation cues conveyed by communication sounds is one of the factors constraining the neuronal discrimination in subcortical and cortical levels.

Spectro-temporal properties of auditory cortex neurons have been extensively studied with artificial sounds but it is still unclear whether they help in understanding neuronal responses to communication sounds. Here, we directly compared spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) obtained from the same neurons using both artificial stimuli (dynamic moving ripples, DMRs) and natural stimuli (conspecific vocalizations) that were matched in terms of spectral content, average power and modulation spectrum. On a population of auditory cortex neurons exhibiting reliable tuning curves when tested with pure tones, significant STRFs were obtained for 62% of the cells with vocalizations and 68% with DMR. However, for many cells with significant vocalization-derived STRFs (STRFvoc) and DMR-derived STRFs (STRFdmr), the BF, latency, bandwidth and global STRFs shape differed more than what would be predicted by spiking responses simulated by a linear model based on a non-homogenous Poisson process. Moreover STRFvoc predicted neural responses to vocalizations more accurately than STRFdmr predicted neural response to DMRs, despite similar spike-timing reliability for both sets of stimuli. Cortical bursts, which potentially introduce nonlinearities in evoked responses, did not explain the differences between STRFvoc and STRFdmr. Altogether, these results suggest that the nonlinearity of auditory cortical responses makes it difficult to predict responses to communication sounds from STRFs computed from artificial stimuli.

In many species, neurons with highly selective stimulus-response properties characterize higher order sensory areas and/or sensory motor areas of the CNS. In the songbird nuclei, the responses of HVC (used as a proper name) neurons during playback of the bird's own song (BOS) are probably one of the most striking examples of selectivity for natural stimuli. We examined here to what extent spike-timing carries information about natural and time-reversed versions of the BOS. From a heterogenous population of 107 HVC neurons recorded in long-day or short-day conditions, a standard indicator of stimulus preference based on spike-count (the d' index) indicates that a limited proportion of cells can be classified as selective for the BOS (20% with a |d'| > 1). In contrast, quantifying the information conveyed by spike trains with the metric-space of J.D. Victor & K.P Purpura [(1996) J. Neurophysiol., 76, 1310-1326] indicates that 62% of the cells display significant amounts of transmitted information, among which 77% are 'temporal cells'. 'Temporal cells' correspond to cells transmitting significant amounts of information when spike-timing is considered, whereas no information, or lower amounts of transmitted information, is obtained when only spike-count is considered. Computing a correlation index between spike trains [S. Schreiber et al. (2003) Neurocomputing, 52-54,925-931] revealed that spike-timing reliability is higher for the forward than for the reverse BOS, whatever the day length and the cell type are. Cells classified as selective in terms of spike-counts (d' index) had greater amounts of transmitted information, but cells classified as non-selective (d' < 0.5) can also transmit significant amounts of information. Thus, information theory methods demonstrate that a much larger proportion of neurons than expected based on spike-count only participate in the discrimination between stimuli.