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Abstract:
Communication signals are important for social interactions and survival and are thought to
receive specialized processing in the visual and auditory systems. Whereas the neural processing
of faces by face clusters and face cells has been repeatedly studied, less is known about
the neural representation of voice content. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies have localized voice-preferring regions in the primate temporal lobe, but the
hemodynamic response cannot directly assess neurophysiological properties. We investigated
the responses of neurons in an fMRI-identified voice cluster in awake monkeys, and here we
provide the first systematic evidence for voice cells. "Voice cells" were identified, in analogy
to "face cells", as neurons responding at least 2-fold stronger to conspecific voices than to
"nonvoice" sounds or heterospecific voices. Importantly, whereas face clusters are thought
to contain high proportions of face cells responding broadly to many faces, we found that
voice clusters contain moderate proportions of voice cells. Furthermore, individual voice cells
exhibit high stimulus selectivity. The results reveal the neurophysiological bases for fMRIdefined
voice clusters in the primate brain and highlight potential differences in how the
auditory and visual systems generate selective representations of communication signals.
