Project description
How our brain recognises our own voice
Humans as well as certain animals have the unique ability to recognise their own voice and even slight modifications of their voices. This self-recognition is an important aspect of social interaction and takes place somewhere in the auditory system. The aim of the EU-funded VocalBrain project is to delineate the mechanism underlying this sound discrimination by studying brain activity. Researchers will employ the transparent fish Danionella translucida and map neural activity that correlates with vocal self-representation. Results will help determine when the processing of self-generated and external sounds diverges in vertebrates.
Objective
Many animal species generate acoustic signals for social communication and are faced with the challenge to distinguish external from self-generated sounds. How does the brain accomplish this when all sounds are coming in through the ear? It requires that self- generated and external sounds are separated at some point in the central auditory system. Copies of motor commands indicate to auditory brain areas when self-generated sounds are expected to arrive. This feedforward signaling suppresses neural responses in primary auditory nuclei, as well as the auditory cortex. Neurons that are activated with self- vocalization are also found in the auditory cortex. Yet, how the signal arrives there and where along the auditory processing pathway neural encoding of self-generated and external sounds diverge, is largely unknown. These are challenging questions to address because single-cell activity needs to be recorded simultaneously across several distant brain regions. This is currently only possible with fluorescent imaging techniques, but adult vertebrate brain tissue is too opaque for large-scale optical access. Danionella translucida (DT) is a transparent, miniature fish that vocalizes in social contexts and is therefore uniquely suitable for studying whole-brain activity of auditory processing during self- vocalization. Here I propose to generate an unbiased, whole-brain map of neural activity correlated with vocal self-representation and its cancellation. For this, I will establish stimulations of fictive vocalizations in DT and combine these with auditory playback while performing whole-brain calcium imaging. This data will offer unprecedented insights into vocal-auditory interactions across a vertebrate brain.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
10117 Berlin
Germany