Hormone Dependent and Experience Dependent Auditory Plasticity for Social Communication
The auditory neural circuit is embedded in a physiological environment that can be influenced by hormones. Early work demonstrated that hormone mechanisms are highly responsive to social contexts. More recent work shows that hormones affect auditory processing across contexts, leading to adaptive responses to auditory cues, including those involved in social communication. This chapter addresses recent progress in studying these and related mechanisms among mammals in a maternal communication paradigm, wherein both reproductive hormones (e.g. estrogen, oxytocin) and social experience (infant mother interaction) shape auditory responses to infant sounds. By broadly reviewing studies ranging from hormones and behavior to sensory processing and plasticity, this chapter lays out a systematic approach to investigating how hormones may provide a mechanism for enhancing the perception and learning of auditory cues in reproductive and other social contexts. As discussed, reproductive related hormones may induce plasticity in central auditory circuitry to enable a sustained trace of infant vocalizations in the auditory cortex, allowing for better recognition and detection of infant cues and sustained maternal behavior.