MaRGA Meeting, 2004: Abstracts

12: Neuroscience / Communication / Behavior

Common Marmoset as a Model to Study
the Neural Basis of Primate Vocal Communication

X. Wang

Affiliation: Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD

Understanding how the brain processes vocal communication sounds remains one of the most challenging problems in neuroscience. The long-term objective of the research in my laboratory is to reveal physiological mechanisms underlying perception and production of vocal communication sounds in non-human primates. The marmoset is chosen for our studies because it has several important advantages over other non-human primate species for behavioral, neurophysiological and developmental studies in laboratory conditions (namely, highly vocal in captivity, easily bred and a smooth brain). In the past several years, we have established a quantitative database of marmoset vocalizations captured in our breeding colony at Johns Hopkins. Our results showed that marmosets vocalize a rich repertoire of communication sounds that contain exquisite information for discriminating call types and caller identity, similar to some of the fundamental properties demonstrated for human speech. We have also pursued extensive neurophysiological experiments that aim to understand neural encoding mechanisms in auditory cortex of marmosets. Findings from these experiments have showed a close correlation between spectral and temporal characteristics of marmoset vocalizations and response properties of cortical neurons, as well as auditory-vocal interactions in auditory cortex of this non-primate species. Our studies have demonstrated the promising potential of the common marmoset as a neuroethological model to advance the understanding of human speech and language processing in the brain. I will summarize in my presentation a series of studies from my laboratory addressing these issues.

This research was supported by NIH Grants DC03180, DC05808; Publications available at http://www.bme.jhu.edu/~xwang/papers.html.