Motor planning for vocal production in common marmosets

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.07.038

Animal Behaviour

Volume 78, Issue 5, November 2009, Pages 1195-1203

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.07.038 Get rights and content

The vocal motor plan is one of the most fundamental and poorly understood elements of primate vocal production. Here we tested whether a single vocal motor plan comprises the full length of a vocalization. We hypothesized that if a single motor plan was determined at vocal onset, the acoustic features early in the call should be predictive of the subsequent call structure. Analyses were performed on two classes of features in marmoset phee calls: continuous and discrete. We first generated correlation matrices of all the continuous features of phee calls. Results showed that the start frequency of a phee's first pulse significantly correlated with all subsequent spectral features. Moreover, significant correlations were evident within both the spectral and temporal features, but there was little relationship between these feature classes. Using a discrete feature, ‘the number of pulses in the phee call’, a discriminant function was able to correctly classify the number of pulses in the calls well above chance based solely on the acoustic structure of the call's first pulse. Together, these data suggest that a vocal motor plan for the complete call structure is established at call onset. These findings provide a key insight into the mechanisms underlying vocal production in nonhuman primates.

Section snippets

Subjects

We recorded 1701 phee calls produced by 10 adult common marmosets (6 male, 4 female). The common marmoset is a small-bodied (∼400 g), New World primate endemic to the rainforests of northeastern Brazil (Rylands 1993). Subjects are housed in social groups consisting of pair-bonded mates and up to two generations of offspring. This highly vocal primate has been the subject of several previous behavioural and neural studies of vocal communication (Norcross and Newman, 1993, Wang and Kadia, 2001,

Continuous Feature Analysis

We analysed 1701 naturally produced phee calls from 10 adult common marmosets. The data set consisted of 507 one-pulse phees, 1052 two-pulse phees and 142 three-pulse phees. As discussed above, we used only two-pulse phees in the continuous feature analysis. To test the extent to which the spectral and temporal features of phee calls were correlated across phee calls, we performed the following cross-correlation analyses. For this analysis, we only tested those measured acoustic features that

Discussion

The aim of this study was to test the structure of one of the most fundamental aspects of vocal production, the vocal motor plan. Motor plans are common in deliberate motor acts for determining the sequence of actions prior to their initiation (Sternbert et al., 1978, Zingale and Kowler, 1987, Sarlegna and Sainburg, 2008). Its existence in the vocal motor system, however, has not been addressed. We asked the following question. When a vocalization is produced, does the motor plan comprise all

Acknowledgments

We thank Mark Bee, Asif Ghazanfar, Judith Scarl, Yi Zhou and two referees for helpful comments on this manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health to C.T.M. (K99 DC009007) and X.W. (R01 DC005808).

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¹: S. J. Eliades and X. Wang are at the Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, 720 Rutland Avenue, Traylor 412, Baltimore, MD 21205, U.S.A.

View full text

Motor planning for vocal production in common marmosets

Section snippets

Subjects

Continuous Feature Analysis

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Brain Research

Neuroscience Letters

Journal of Voice

Behavioural Brain Research

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Vision Research

Acoustic communication in noise: regularion of call characteristics in a New World monkey

Journal of Experimental Biology

The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

Virtual vocalization stimuli for investigating neural representations of species-specific vocalizations

Journal of Neurophysiology

Noise-induced vocal modulation in cotton-top tamarins

American Journal of Primatology

Perturbation of auditory feedback causes systematic pertubation in vocal structure in adult cotton-top tamarins

Journal of Experimental Biology

Tracking silence: adjusting vocal production to avoid acoustic interference

Journal of Comparative Physiology A

Sensory–motor interaction in the primate auditory cortex during self-initiated vocalizations

Journal of Neurophysiology

Neural substrates of vocalization feedback monitoring in primate auditory cortex

Nature

Constraints in primate vocal production

Whistle matching in wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

Science

Computational motor control