Behaviour and Neurodynamics for Auditory Communication

Explains how arousal, motivation, emotion and behavioral contexts are vocally expressed and how important sound attributes are recognized and perceived.

Jagmeet Kanwal (Edited by), Günter Ehret (Edited by)

9780521829182, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 April 2006

384 pages, 82 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.737 kg

How do animals produce and process sounds for communication? How do their brains encode the large amounts of sensory information so rapidly and how do they use this to cope with their environment? These questions not only concern the evolution of sound communication systems but also aim to understand how arousal, motivation, emotion and behavioral contexts are vocally expressed and how important sound attributes are recognized and perceived. This book highlights auditory communication in several species from four perspectives: actual sound communication, audio-vocal adaptations, adaptations of sound processing and representation in higher auditory brain centers, and emotional and cognitive adaptations in signaling and processing. Broad in scope and geared towards graduate students and researchers within the fields of auditory communication and cognition, this book will appeal to auditory neurobiologists, speech, hearing and communication scientists and engineers, students of animal behavior and neuroethologists.

Preface
Part I. Behavioral and Anatomical/Physiological Adaptations: 1. Vocal mechanisms for avian communication Roderick A. Suthers, Gabriël J. L. Beckers and Brian S. Nelson
2. The blind mole rat: an example of seismic communication via acoustic channels Zvi Wollberg, Rony Rado and Ronen S. Sadka
3. Audiovocal communication and social behavior in mustached bats Matthew J. Clement, Punita Gupta, Nicole Dietz and Jagmeet S. Kanwal
4. Common rules of communication sound perception Günter Ehret
Behavioral and physiological adaptations: summary and discussion Günter Ehret and Jagmeet S. Kanwal
Part II. Neural Adaptations and Plasticity: 5. Neural mechanisms of vocal communication: interfacing with neuroendocrine mechanisms Andrew Bass
6. Processing of species specific vocalizations in the auditory brainstem and midbrain of Mexican free tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) Achim Klug, Eric E. Bauer, Joshua T. Hanson and George D. Pollak
7. A distributed cortical representation of social communication calls Jagmeet S. Kanwal
8. Spatiotemporal processing in the guinea pig auditory cortex Junsei Horikawa, Andreas Hess, Yutaka Hosokawa and Ikuo Taniguchi
9. Hierarchical processing of communication sounds in primates Josef Rauschecker and Biao Tian
10. Synaptic mechanisms and sensitive periods for song learning J. Matthew Kittelberger and Richard Mooney
11. Neuronal substrates of sensory processing for song perception and learning in songbirds: lessons from the mormyrid electric fish Claudio V. Mello and Patrick D. Roberts
12. Cortical plasticity and auditory communication Jun Yan and Jos Eggermont
13. Mesoscopic neurodynamics in cortex during auditory concept learning Frank W. Ohl, Henning Scheich and Walter J. Freeman
Neural adaptations and plasticity: summary and discussion Jagmeet S. Kanwal and Günter Ehret
Appendix: Basics of acoustic signal processing.

Subject Areas: Animal behaviour [PSVP], Neurosciences [PSAN]