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A voice region in the monkey brain

Nature Neuroscience volume 11, pages 367–374 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

For vocal animals, recognizing species-specific vocalizations is important for survival and social interactions. In humans, a voice region has been identified that is sensitive to human voices and vocalizations. As this region also strongly responds to speech, it is unclear whether it is tightly associated with linguistic processing and is thus unique to humans. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging of macaque monkeys (Old World primates, Macaca mulatta) we discovered a high-level auditory region that prefers species-specific vocalizations over other vocalizations and sounds. This region not only showed sensitivity to the 'voice' of the species, but also to the vocal identify of conspecific individuals. The monkey voice region is located on the superior-temporal plane and belongs to an anterior auditory 'what' pathway. These results establish functional relationships with the human voice region and support the notion that, for different primate species, the anterior temporal regions of the brain are adapted for recognizing communication signals from conspecifics.

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Figure 1: Auditory cortex regions preferring species-specific vocalizations in two awake monkeys.
Figure 2: Auditory cortical field summaries of MVocs preference.
Figure 3: Experiments with anesthetized animals.
Figure 4: Brain clusters outside of auditory cortex that prefer MVocs.
Figure 5: Auditory cortex regions preferring familiar conspecific vocalizations (Experiment 2).
Figure 6: Sensitivity in the anterior STP region to the identity of the individuals producing the vocalizations (Experiment 3).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to P. Belin, T. Hackett, D. Leopold, M. Mishkin and K. Tanji for useful discussions and suggestions throughout the study. We recognize the contribution of the nonhuman primates. This work was supported by the Max-Planck Society, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrasse 38, Tübingen, 72076, Germany

    Christopher I Petkov, Christoph Kayser, Thomas Steudel, Kevin Whittingstall, Mark Augath & Nikos K Logothetis

  2. Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, Stopford Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, N13 9PT, UK

    Nikos K Logothetis

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  1. Christopher I Petkov
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Contributions

C.I.P. conceived and designed the experiments. C.I.P., C.K., T.S. and M.A. carried out the experiments. C.I.P. analyzed the data and wrote the paper. C.K. and N.K.L. contributed conceptually and with data analysis. C.I.P., C.K., T.S., K.W., M.A. and N.K.L. provided materials and analysis tools.

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Correspondence to Christopher I Petkov.

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Petkov, C., Kayser, C., Steudel, T. et al. A voice region in the monkey brain. Nat Neurosci 11, 367–374 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn2043

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