Bats, Bats and more Bats

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Many animals use complex sounds to communication information to members of their species. For example, many female animals recognize their offspring solely from calls emitted from the young when isolated. The communication sounds used by many animals share acoustic features such as similarity in frequency and timing information. This is also true for human speech. We understand very little about how the auditory systems of different animals process species-specific vocalizations.

In the laboratory of Dr. Christine Portfors, the central auditory system of bats and mice is studied to understand how individual neurons encode species-specific vocalizations. The benefits of using both bats and mice as model systems to understand auditory processing (including speech) are many. Bats, and in particular the mustached bat, have a large part of their brain devoted to processing sound so aspects of neural processing may be specialized. However, the auditory system is essentially mammalian in structure and function so our findings may be applicable to understanding how humans encode complex sounds such as speech.

Currently, we are investigating how individual neurons in the central auditory system selectively encode communication sounds. The significance of this work is in understanding how neurons process complex sound and thus how speech sounds in humans may be encoded. Mice provide additional benefits. Certain strains have age-related hearing losses that are similar to hearing losses that occur in elderly humans. Studying the effects of hearing loss on processing of communication sounds in mice is the first step to prevention and reduction of speech processing deficits in humans.