Improved cortical entrainment to infant communication calls in mothers compared with virgin mice

There is a growing interest in the use of mice as a model system for species-specific communication. In particular, ultrasonic calls emitted by mouse pups communicate distress, and elicit a search and retrieval response from mothers. Behaviorally, mothers prefer and recognize these calls in two-alternative choice tests, in contrast to pup-naive females that do not have experience with pups. Here, we explored whether one particular acoustic feature that defines these calls - the repetition rate of calls within a bout - is represented differently in the auditory cortex of these two animal groups. Multiunit recordings in anesthetized CBA/CaJ mice revealed that: (i) neural entrainment to repeated stimuli extended up to the natural pup call repetition rate (5 Hz) in mothers; but (ii) neurons in naive females followed repeated stimuli well only at slower repetition rates; and (iii) entrained responses to repeated pup calls were less sensitive to natural pup call variability in mothers than in pup-naive females. In the broader context, our data suggest that auditory cortical responses to communication sounds are plastic, and that communicative significance is correlated with an improved cortical representation.