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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 15, 2004, 24(50):11264-11272; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2079-04.2004

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Functional Mapping of the Auditory Midbrain during Mate Call Reception

Kim L. Hoke,¹ Sabrina S. Burmeister,³ Russell D. Fernald,⁴ A. Stanley Rand,⁵ Michael J. Ryan,¹ and Walter Wilczynski²

¹Section of Integrative Biology and ²Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, ³Department of Psychology and ⁴Neurosciences Program, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, and ⁵Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama

We examined patterns of neural activity as assayed by changes in gene expression to localize representation of acoustic mating signals in the auditory midbrain of frogs. We exposed wild-caught male Physalaemus pustulosus to conspecific mating calls that vary in their behavioral salience, nonsalient mating calls, or no sound. We measured expression of the immediate early gene egr-1 (also called ZENK, zif268, NGFI-A, and krox-24) throughout the torus semicircularis, the auditory midbrain homolog of the inferior colliculus. Differential egr-1 induction in response to the acoustic stimuli occurred in the laminar, midline, and principal nuclei of the torus semicircularis, whereas the ventral region did not show significant effects of stimulus. The laminar nucleus differentially responded to conspecific mating calls compared with nonsalient mating calls, whereas the midline and principal nuclei responded preferentially to one of two conspecific calls. These responses were not explained by simple acoustic properties of the stimuli, and they demonstrate a functional heterogeneity of auditory processing of complex biological signals within the frog midbrain. Moreover, using analyses that assess the ability of the torus semicircularis as a whole to discriminate among acoustic stimuli, we found that activity patterns in the four regions together provide more information about biologically relevant acoustic stimuli than activity in any single region.

Key words: auditory; midbrain; amphibian; egr-1; mating; túngara frogs

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Received May 28, 2004; revised November 3, 2004; accepted November 4, 2004.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				H. C. Gerhardt, C. C. Martinez-Rivera, J. J. Schwartz, V. T. Marshall, and C. G. Murphy Preferences based on spectral differences in acoustic signals in four species of treefrogs (Anura: Hylidae) J. Exp. Biol., September 1, 2007; 210(17): 2990 - 2998. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				K. L. Hoke, M. J. Ryan, and W. Wilczynski Social cues shift functional connectivity in the hypothalamus PNAS, July 26, 2005; 102(30): 10712 - 10717. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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