Natural auditory behaviors invoke cognitive brain networks

Auditory processing is traditionally framed as a hierarchical extraction of acoustic features along a canonical ascending pathway, starting in the cochlea and engaging dedicated auditory processing regions in the brainstem and midbrain on the way to the auditory cortex. Yet real-world listening scenarios, such as those found in a cocktail party (i.e., within a group of simultaneously vocalizing humans and other animals), invoke cognitive processes to facilitate the segregation of overlapping sources, suppress self-generated signals, and activate rapid sensorimotor adjustments. In this review, we argue that auditory perception, particularly in challenging listening situations, is best understood as an emergent property of the interactions between the canonical auditory pathway and distributed networks supporting attention, prediction, memory, and action selection. We propose the echolocating bat as a powerful model system with a rich behavioral repertoire and conserved mammalian neural architecture that can be leveraged to uncover general principles of natural sound processing.