Auditory communication in humans and other animals frequently takes place in noisy environments with many co‐occurring signallers. Receivers are thus challenged to rapidly recognize salient auditory signals and filter out irrelevant sounds. Most bird species produce a variety of complex vocalizations that function to communicate with other members of their own species and behavioural evidence broadly supports preferences for conspecific over heterospecific sounds (auditory species recognition). However, it remains unclear whether such auditory signals are categorically recognized by the sensory and central nervous system. Here, we review 53 published studies that compare avian neural responses between conspecific versus heterospecific vocalizations. Irrespective of the techniques used to characterize neural activity, distinct nuclei of the auditory forebrain are consistently shown to be repeatedly conspecific selective across taxa, even in response to unfamiliar individuals with distinct acoustic properties. Yet, species‐specific neural discrimination is not a stereotyped auditory response, but is modulated according to its salience depending, for example, on ontogenetic exposure to conspecific versus heterospecific stimuli. Neuromodulators, in particular norepinephrine, may mediate species recognition by regulating the accuracy of neuronal coding for salient conspecific stimuli. Our review lends strong support for neural structures that categorically recognize conspecific signals despite the highly variable physical properties of the stimulus. The available data are in support of a ‘perceptual filter’‐based mechanism to determine the saliency of the signal, in that species identity and social experience combine to influence the neural processing of species‐specific auditory stimuli. Finally, we present hypotheses and their testable predictions, to propose next steps in species‐recognition research into the emerging model of the neural conceptual construct in avian auditory recognition.

中文翻译：

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鸟类听觉物种识别的神经机制

人类和其他动物的听觉交流经常发生在嘈杂的环境中，同时有许多信号器。因此，接收器面临着快速识别显着听觉信号并滤除不相关声音的挑战。大多数鸟类产生各种复杂的发声，其功能是与其他物种的其他成员交流，行为证据广泛支持同种声音而非异种声音的偏好（听觉物种识别）。然而，尚不清楚这种听觉信号是否被感觉和中枢神经系统明确识别。在这里，我们回顾了 53 项已发表的研究，这些研究比较了同种和异种发声之间的鸟类神经反应。无论用于表征神经活动的技术如何，听觉前脑的不同细胞核始终表现出对分类群的重复同种选择性，即使是对具有不同声学特性的陌生个体的反应。然而，物种特异性神经辨别不是一种刻板的听觉反应，而是根据其显着性进行调节，例如，取决于个体遗传对同种刺激和异种刺激的暴露。神经调节剂，特别是去甲肾上腺素，可以通过调节神经元编码显着同种刺激的准确性来介导物种识别。我们的评论为神经结构提供了强有力的支持，尽管刺激的物理特性变化很大，但这些神经结构可以分类识别同种信号。可用数据支持基于“感知滤波器”的机制来确定信号的显着性，在那种情况下，物种身份和社会经验结合起来影响物种特异性听觉刺激的神经处理。最后，我们提出了假设及其可检验的预测，以提出物种识别研究的下一步，以研究鸟类听觉识别中神经概念构造的新兴模型。