Biology subjects

Piette, T.

Publications and source records attributed to Piette, T..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Light propofol anaesthesia for non-invasive auditory EEG recording in unrestrained non-human primates.

Non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) experiments have been instrumental in advancing our understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in the production and perception of sounds and human speech. Performing similar experiments in non-human primates (NHPs) would help further deepen our knowledge by allowing us to investigate the evolutionary roots of these processes. However, performing EEG on NHPs is a challenge, given its sensitivity to motion artefacts, device cost and durability, and animal training requirements. For these reasons, most attempts have used invasive intracranial recordings, which led us to develop an alternative that minimises stress and prioritises animal welfare. By using mild propofol sedation, neurophysiological experimentation can easily be integrated into the routine sanitary checks of captive animals and allows the optimisation of both EEG quality and animal welfare. To assess the influence of propofol on brain activity in NHPs, we sedated three olive baboons (Papio anubis), scored their sleep stages under different doses, and recorded auditory event-related potentials (ERP)in response to grunts. Analyses of the EEG recordings with regards to sleep stage and ERP components indicate that at low dose (< 0.1mg/kg/h), propofol induces a light sleep state conducive to recording stimulus-elicited auditory activity. Overall, this experiment confirms the use of propofol sedation as an appropriate technique to study auditory processes through unrestrained, non-invasive EEG in NHPs.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Animal acoustic communication maintains a universal optimum rhythm

Most animals interact with conspecifics through acoustic signals that are modulated in frequency and rhythm. While small animals vocalize at higher pitch than large ones due to the smaller size of their vocal apparatus, the rules governing vocalization rhythms throughout the animal kingdom remain unknown. Vocal rhythms serve as a natural information parser, and one possibility is that they are constrained by the neural rhythms of transmitter and receiver, known to be relatively conserved across species and independent of their size. In this study, we quantified acoustic rhythms across taxa and investigated their evolutionary history with regard to phylogeny and selective pressure. In 98 species from six classes, we tested the main factors likely to influence their communication rhythms: morphology, physiology, social complexity, mastication and detectability. Phylogenetic modeling did not confirm the influence of these species-specific factors, but rather point to a scenario where acoustic communication rhythms have been maintained around an optimum at around 3Hz in the biological (neuronal) delta range (1-4Hz) well before the mammals split. These results suggest that the rhythm of acoustic communication signals, unlike their pitch, has a universal neural determinant that has been conserved throughout evolution, allowing for intra- and cross-species signaling.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Dogs' sensory-motor tuning shapes dog-human vocal interactions

Within species, vocal and auditory systems co-evolve to converge on a critical temporal acoustic structure that can be best produced and perceived. While dogs cannot produce articulated sounds, they respond to speech, raising the question as to whether this heterospecific receptive ability is shaped by exposure to speech or bounded by their own sensorimotor capacity. Acoustic analyses of vocalisations show that dogs main production rhythm is slower than the dominant (syllabic) speech rate, and that human dog-directed speech falls halfway in between. Comparative exploration of neural (electroencephalography) and behavioural responses to speech reveals that comprehension in dogs relies on a slower speech rhythm tracking (delta) than humans (theta), even though dogs are equally sensitive to human speech content and prosody. Thus, the dog audio-motor tuning differs from humans, who vocally adjust their speech rate to this shared temporal channel.

neuroscience↗