Neural responses to communication sound in the inferior colliculus of the naked mole‐rat

The naked mole‐rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is a highly social subterranean rodent that lives in Eastern Africa. Because they a dig burrow system and spend most of their lives underground, they are functionally blind and rely heavily on auditory information. They have at least 17 different vocalizations, which are associated with specific behavioral contexts. In this study, we focused on the soft chirp (SC), which is one of the most frequent vocalizations in this species, and recorded neural responses to synthesized SCs in the inferior colliculus. We found that the responses could be divided into three groups based on their response patterns. These response patterns represented the duration or frequency of stimuli. In addition, we also found that the number of spikes changed with the degree of frequency modulation. From these results, we hypothesized that the vocalizations of naked mole‐rats can be represented by integrating the activity of such neurons that respond to a specific feature of sound.