Frontal mechanisms underlying primate calls recognition by humans.
Leonardo Ceravolo1,2, Coralie Debracque1,2, Eva Pool2,3
1Neuroscience of Emotions and Affective Dynamics lab, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Unimail building, Boulevard Pont-d'Arve 40CH-1205, Geneva, Switzerland.
Cerebral Cortex Communications
|November 29, 2023
Summary
Human brains process primate vocalizations, revealing distinct frontal lobe mechanisms. This research highlights how the human brain evolved to understand diverse vocal signals, including those from other species.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Primatology
- Evolutionary Biology
- Bioacoustics
Background:
- Human verbal language processing is complex, involving semantics and affective vocalizations shared with other primates.
- Understanding the neural basis of vocalization processing is key to understanding human language evolution.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying human categorization of primate vocalizations.
- To identify brain regions involved in processing vocalizations from humans, great apes, and monkeys.
Main Methods:
- Human participants categorized vocalizations from humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and rhesus macaques during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
- Model-based fMRI analysis used trial-by-trial fitted probability of accurate species classification.
- Acoustic variability between species was controlled.
Main Results:
- Participants successfully classified vocalizations above chance for all species except bonobos.
- Bilateral orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis (IFGtri) activity correlated and anti-correlated with classification accuracy, respectively.
- Enhanced activity in a left IFGtri sub-area was observed for accurate chimpanzee call classification compared to human voices.
Conclusions:
- Distinct frontal lobe mechanisms are involved in processing primate vocalizations.
- These findings provide insights into the evolutionary development of the human brain for vocal signal processing.
- The study highlights species-specific neural responses to vocalizations within the primate communication spectrum.
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