title: Improved cortical entrainment to infant communication calls in mothers compared with virgin mice.
abstract: There is a growing interest in the use of mice as a model system for species-specific communication. In particular, ultrasonic calls emitted by mouse pups communicate distress, and elicit a search and retrieval response from mothers. Behaviorally, mothers prefer and recognize these calls in two-alternative choice tests, in contrast to pup-naïve females that do not have experience with pups. Here, we explored whether one particular acoustic feature that defines these calls-- the repetition rate of calls within a bout-- is represented differently in the auditory cortex of these two animal groups. Multiunit recordings in anesthetized CBA/CaJ mice revealed that: (i) neural entrainment to repeated stimuli extended up to the natural pup call repetition rate (5 Hz) in mothers; but (ii) neurons in naïve females followed repeated stimuli well only at slower repetition rates; and (iii) entrained responses to repeated pup calls were less sensitive to natural pup call variability in mothers than in pup-naïve females. In the broader context, our data suggest that auditory cortical responses to communication sounds are plastic, and that communicative significance is correlated with an improved cortical representation.
authors.affiliation: W. M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California at San Francisco, 513 Parnassus Avenue, USA. robert.liu@emory.edu
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Jennifer F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Linden
authors.forename: Christoph E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Schreiner
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000818:Animals; D000831:Animals, Newborn; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D008425:Maternal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D051379:Mice; D008808:Mice, Inbred CBA; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013017:Sound Localization / Q000502:physiology*; D013018:Sound Spectrography / Q000379:methods; D014465:Ultrasonics; D014828:Vocalization, Animal / Q000502:physiology*