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1. Melatonin receptor expression in vocal, auditory, and neuroendocrine centers of a highly vocal fish, the plainfin midshipman ( Porichthys notatus )

   https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.24629  

   Feng, Ni Y.; Marchaterre, Margaret A.; Bass, Andrew H. (January 2019, Journal of Comparative Neurology)

   Abstract Melatonin plays a central role in entraining activity to the day–night cycle in vertebrates. Here, we investigate neuroanatomical substrates of melatonin‐dependent vocal–acoustic behavior in the nocturnal and highly vocal teleost fish, the plainfin midshipman (Porichthys notatus). Using in situ hybridization (ISH) and quantitative real‐time PCR (qPCR), we assess the mRNA distribution and transcript abundance of melatonin receptor subtype 1B (mel1b), shown to be important for vocalization in midshipman fish and songbirds. ISH shows robustmel1bexpression in major nodes of the central vocal and auditory networks in the subpallium, preoptic area (POA), anterior hypothalamus, dorsal thalamus, posterior tuberculum, midbrain torus semicircularis and periaqueductal gray, and hindbrain.Mel1blabel is also abundant in secondary targets of the olfactory, visual, and lateral line systems, as well as telencephalic regions that have been compared to the amygdala, extended amygdala, striatum, septum, and hippocampus of tetrapods. Q‐PCR corroboratesmel1babundance throughout the brain and shows significant increases in the morning compared with nighttime in tissue samples inclusive of the telencephalon and POA, but remains stable in other brain regions. Plasma melatonin levels show expected increase at night. Our findings support the hypothesis that melatonin's stimulatory effects on vocal–acoustic mechanisms in midshipman is mediated, in part, by melatonin binding in vocal, auditory, and neuroendocrine centers. Together with robustmel1bexpression in multiple telencephalic nuclei and sensory systems, the results further indicate an expression pattern comparable to that in birds and mammals that is indicative of melatonin's broad involvement in the modulation of physiology and behavior. 

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2. Decoding contextual influences on auditory perception from primary auditory cortex

   https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.94296.3  

   Englitz, Bernhard; Akram, Sahar; Elhilali, Mounya; Shamma, Shihab (December 2024, eLife)

   Perception can be highly dependent on stimulus context, but whether and how sensory areas encode the context remains uncertain. We used an ambiguous auditory stimulus – a tritone pair – to investigate the neural activity associated with a preceding contextual stimulus that strongly influenced the tritone pair’s perception: either as an ascending or a descending step in pitch. We recorded single-unit responses from a population of auditory cortical cells in awake ferrets listening to the tritone pairs preceded by the contextual stimulus. We find that the responses adapt locally to the contextual stimulus, consistent with human MEG recordings from the auditory cortex under the same conditions. Decoding the population responses demonstrates that cells responding to pitch-changes are able to predict well the context-sensitive percept of the tritone pairs. Conversely, decoding the individual pitch representations and taking their distance in the circular Shepard tone space predicts theoppositeof the percept. The various percepts can be readily captured and explained by a neural model of cortical activity based on populations of adapting, pitch and pitch-direction cells, aligned with the neurophysiological responses. Together, these decoding and model results suggest that contextual influences on perception may well be already encoded at the level of the primary sensory cortices, reflecting basic neural response properties commonly found in these areas. 

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3. Auditory Thalamocortical Transformations

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1006-0_102  

   Imaizumi, Kazuo; Lee, Charles C (January 2022, Springer New York)
4. Experience-Driven Auditory Attention

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.08.002  

   Addleman, Douglas A.; Jiang, Yuhong V. (November 2019, Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
5. Auditory-vocal coupling in the naked mole-rat, a mammal with poor auditory thresholds

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-018-1287-8  

   Okanoya, Kazuo; Yosida, Shigeto; Barone, Catherine M.; Applegate, Daniel T.; Brittan-Powell, Elizabeth F.; Dooling, Robert J.; Park, Thomas J. (November 2018, Journal of Comparative Physiology A)