“…Efficient encoding of conspecific vocalizations may be facilitated by neurons in the IC that respond to specific acoustic features found in vocalizations such as frequency modulations (Woolley and Casseday, 2005;Andoni et al, 2007), amplitude modulations (McAlpine, 2004;Woolley and Casseday, 2005), duration (Brand et al, 2000;Pérez-González et al, 2006), and/or combination sensitivity (Portfors and Wenstrup, 1999;Portfors, 2004). Although previous studies focused on feature selectivity by individual neurons to synthetic stimuli or token vocalizations, it is unknown whether the IC uses heterogeneity and/or selectivity to efficiently encode natural stimuli.…”