Little is known about the neural mechanisms that mediate differential action-selection responses to communication and echolocation calls in bats. For example, in the big brown bat, frequency modulated (FM) food-claiming communication calls closely resemble FM echolocation calls, which guide social and orienting behaviors, respectively. Using advanced signal processing methods, we identified fine differences in temporal structure of these natural sounds that appear key to auditory discrimination and behavioral decisions. We recorded extracellular potentials from single neurons in the midbrain inferior colliculus (IC) of passively listening animals, and compared responses to playbacks of acoustic signals used by bats for social communication and echolocation. We combined information obtained from spike number and spike triggered averages (STA) to reveal a robust classification of neuron selectivity for communication or echolocation calls. These data highlight the importance of temporal acoustic structure for differentiating echolocation and food-claiming social calls and point to general mechanisms of natural sound processing across species.

中文翻译：

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蝙蝠中脑对自然声音的神经响应选择性。

关于介导蝙蝠对通讯和回声定位调用的不同动作选择响应的神经机制知之甚少。例如，在大棕蝙蝠中，调频（FM）宣称食物的通信呼叫与FM回声定位呼叫非常相似，后者分别引导社交行为和定向行为。使用先进的信号处理方法，我们发现了这些自然声音在时间结构上的细微差别，这些细微差别似乎是听觉歧视和行为决策的关键。我们记录了被动听觉动物的中脑下丘（IC）中单个神经元的细胞外电位，并比较了蝙蝠用于社交和回声定位的声信号回放的响应。我们结合了从尖峰数和尖峰触发平均值（STA）获得的信息，以揭示针对通信或回声定位呼叫的神经元选择性的可靠分类。这些数据凸显了时空声学结构对于区分回声定位和声称食物的社会呼声的重要性，并指出了跨物种自然声音处理的一般机制。