Salles Angeles, Marino Lee Shirley, Moss Cynthia F
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, United States.
IBRO Neurosci Rep. 2022 Mar 2;12:197-202. doi: 10.1016/j.ibneur.2022.02.005. eCollection 2022 Jun.
Most bat species have highly developed audio-vocal systems, which allow them to adjust the features of echolocation calls that are optimized for different sonar tasks, such as detecting, localizing, discriminating and tracking targets. Furthermore, bats can also produce a wide array of social calls to communicate with conspecifics. The acoustic properties of some social calls differ only subtly from echolocation calls, yet bats have the ability to distinguish them and reliably produce appropriate behavioral responses. Little is known about the underlying neural processes that enable the correct classification of bat social communication sounds. One approach to this question is to identify the brain regions that are involved in the processing of sounds that carry behavioral relevance. Here, we present preliminary data on neuronal activation, as measured by c-fos expression, in big brown bats () exposed to either social calls, echolocation calls or kept in silence. We focused our investigation on five relevant brain areas; three within the canonical auditory pathway (auditory cortex, inferior colliculus and medial geniculate body) and two that are involved in the processing of emotive stimulus content (amygdala and nucleus accumbens). In this manuscript we report c-fos staining of the areas of interest after exposure to conspecific calls. We discuss future work designed to overcome experimental limitations and explore whether c-fos staining reveals anatomical segregation of neurons activated by echolocation and social call categories.
大多数蝙蝠物种拥有高度发达的听觉-发声系统，这使它们能够调整回声定位叫声的特征，这些特征针对不同的声纳任务进行了优化，比如探测、定位、辨别和追踪目标。此外，蝙蝠还能发出各种各样的社交叫声来与同类进行交流。一些社交叫声的声学特性与回声定位叫声仅有细微差别，但蝙蝠有能力区分它们，并可靠地产生适当的行为反应。对于使蝙蝠能够正确分类社交交流声音的潜在神经过程，人们了解甚少。解决这个问题的一种方法是确定参与处理具有行为相关性声音的脑区。在这里，我们展示了关于大棕蝠在暴露于社交叫声、回声定位叫声或处于安静状态下时，通过c-fos表达测量的神经元激活的初步数据。我们将研究重点集中在五个相关脑区；三个在经典听觉通路内（听觉皮层、下丘和内侧膝状体），另外两个参与情感刺激内容的处理（杏仁核和伏隔核）。在本手稿中，我们报告了暴露于同种叫声后感兴趣区域的c-fos染色情况。我们讨论了旨在克服实验局限性并探索c-fos染色是否揭示了由回声定位和社交叫声类别激活的神经元的解剖学分离的未来工作。
