@techreport{Salles2018b,
<br>abstract = {Acoustic communication has been studied in many species, yet our understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms is incomplete. Bats are auditory specialists that use echoes from their own vocalizations to build a scene of their surroundings. At the same time, these social animals live in roosts and use their vocalizations to communicate with conspecifics. Important advances have been made in understanding the neural underpinnings of echolocation, but far less is known about the mechanisms supporting acoustic communication. In big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) call structure, along with behavioral context, appears to determine the function of acoustic signals. We aim to investigate the neural mechanisms that enable the big brown bat's discrimination of communication and echolocation calls from conspecifics, which differ in behavioral relevance but overlap in spectro-temporal features. Here we compare responses of single neurons in the Inferior colliculus (IC) to acoustic signals used by bats for spatial orientation and social communication. We recorded echolocation and communication signals of bats in flight and played back these sounds to awake, passively listening animals. We found that some neurons show selective responses to communication calls. Specifically, sequences of natural communication calls employed by bats as food claiming calls (FM Bouts) elicited strong responses in a subpopulation of neurons, while the same neurons showed weak or no responses to sequences of echolocation calls that matched the timing of the communication FM Bouts. STRF analysis was performed to further understand the stimulus features that contribute to the selectivity of these midbrain neural responses.},
<br>author = {Salles, A and Macias, S and Sundar, H and Elhilali, M and Moss, C},
<br>booktitle = {International conference of neuroethology},
<br>pages = {P072},
<br>title = {{Communication calls elicit selective neural responses in the inferior colliculus of the big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus)}},
<br>year = {2018}
<br>}