Macaques may just seem to be indulging in monkey banter, but they can distinguish one another鈥檚 voices in much the same way that humans do, suggests a new study.
In the human brain, the 鈥渧oice region鈥� in the auditory cortex activates when we hear others speak. It had been unclear if the human voice area was a specialist adaptation that evolved with our spoken language skills.
Now at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in T眉bingen, Germany, and colleagues have found that monkey brains, too, have a voice region.
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They played a variety of sounds to seven macaques and used fMRI to detect any brain areas with increased activity.
Individual differences
One region, corresponding to a site close to the voice region in the human brain, lit up in response to macaque coos and grunts, but was less active when the monkeys heard other animals or natural sounds, such as those of insects, thunder and rain.
Further tests on one monkey showed that the same brain area was more sensitive to differences between individual voices than to differences in the sounds uttered by the same macaque.
鈥淭his means we may be able to use these monkeys as a model to study 鈥榲oice blindness鈥�, a condition where humans cannot tell people apart by their voices,鈥� says Petkov.
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