Family identity is represented within vocal categories by the gerbil auditory cortex

Vocalizations are integral to social communication, with acoustic features that may convey both meaning and information about an animal's identity or emotional state. The neural representation of vocalizations must therefore permit animals to generalize across one set of acoustic features to recognize meaning and a different set of features to recognize vocalizer identity. To test this idea, we recorded the responses of gerbil core auditory cortex (AC) neurons to a large array (n > 1,500) of variants drawn from four vocalization categories and produced by 5 different families. Each vocalization category could be decoded from a small AC population with high accuracy, despite the acoustic variance across vocalization renditions of different families of origin. Further, a larger AC population was required to decode family identity, using a unique set of acoustic features for each category. Thus, AC activity can be used to simultaneously predict vocalization category and family identity and is robust to the natural range of acoustic variance.