Familiarity with social sounds alters c-Fos expression in auditory cortex and interacts with estradiol in locus coeruleus.

Familiarity with social sounds alters c-Fos expression in auditory cortex and interacts with estradiol in locus coeruleus. Hear Res. 2018 Jun 28;: Authors: Moreno A, Gumaste A, Adams GK, Chong KK, Nguyen M, Shepard KN, Liu RC Abstract When a social sound category initially gains behavioral significance to an animal, plasticity events presumably enhance the ability to recognize that sound category in the future. In the context of learning natural social stimuli, neuromodulators such as norepinephrine and estrogen have been associated with experience-dependent plasticity and processing of newly salient social cues, yet continued plasticity once stimuli are familiar could disrupt the stability of sensorineural representations. Here we employed a maternal mouse model of natural sensory cortical plasticity for infant vocalizations to ask whether the engagement of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) by the playback of pup-calls is affected by either prior experience with the sounds or estrogen availability, using a well-studied cellular activity and plasticity marker, the immediate early gene c-Fos. We counted call-induced c-Fos immunoreactive (c-Fos-IR) cells in both LC and physiologically validated fields within the auditory cortex (AC) of estradiol or blank-implanted virgin female mice with either 0 or 5-days prior experience caring for vocalizing pups. Estradiol and pup experience interacted both in the induction of c-Fos-IR in the ...
Source: Hearing Research - Category: Audiology Authors: Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research