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The physiological control of mammalian vocalization
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The physiological control of mammalian vocalization. John D. Newman (Ed.). Press, New York/ London, 1988, 435 p. ISBN 0 306 43003 7
Plenum
During the 1986 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, a symposium gathered people from various horizons who shared an interest in the study of mammalian vocalization, which remains less extensively analyzed than avian vocalization. The papers written for that occasion attempted to summarize personal research on specialized topics in order to find relationships between separate fields of investigation. Experimental material has been collected in individuals, either adult or neonate, of different species: cats, rats, bats, guinea pigs, squirrels and rhesus monkeys, as well as humans. Several functional systems - echolocation, distress, alarm calls, etc. - have been explored at the behavioral or neurophysiological levels by means of more or less sophisticated techniques. By the diversity and the quality of the contributions, this volume constitutes a useful source of references on current work about the cerebral control of movements that, in many aspects, differ from other goal-directed movements. Indeed, several muscle groups (respiratory, laryngeal, facial) cooperate in vocal expression, whose control relies on auditory feedback, and in most of the cases, close links with emotion regulation. Needless to say, we are still far from an integrative view of the different structures of the brain stem and of the limbic system that underlie sound emission. Similarly, one does not clearly see how data on cellular and neurochemical mechanisms can be combined. As far as human language is concerned, the issue of continuity with other mammalian vocalization versus discontinuity (or relation with manual activity) remains an open question. However, the only way to a deeper understanding of this complex matter is to proceed, as in this book, by confronting several approaches to a similar problem, in the hope of eliciting an insight to hidden connections. Pierre Feyereisen, Department of Experimental University of Louvain, B-l 348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Psychology,
The physiological control of mammalian vocalization. John D. Newman (Ed.). Press, New York/ London, 1988, 435 p. ISBN 0 306 43003 7
Plenum
During the 1986 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, a symposium gathered people from various horizons who shared an interest in the study of mammalian vocalization, which remains less extensively analyzed than avian vocalization. The papers written for that occasion attempted to summarize personal research on specialized topics in order to find relationships between separate fields of investigation. Experimental material has been collected in individuals, either adult or neonate, of different species: cats, rats, bats, guinea pigs, squirrels and rhesus monkeys, as well as humans. Several functional systems - echolocation, distress, alarm calls, etc. - have been explored at the behavioral or neurophysiological levels by means of more or less sophisticated techniques. By the diversity and the quality of the contributions, this volume constitutes a useful source of references on current work about the cerebral control of movements that, in many aspects, differ from other goal-directed movements. Indeed, several muscle groups (respiratory, laryngeal, facial) cooperate in vocal expression, whose control relies on auditory feedback, and in most of the cases, close links with emotion regulation. Needless to say, we are still far from an integrative view of the different structures of the brain stem and of the limbic system that underlie sound emission. Similarly, one does not clearly see how data on cellular and neurochemical mechanisms can be combined. As far as human language is concerned, the issue of continuity with other mammalian vocalization versus discontinuity (or relation with manual activity) remains an open question. However, the only way to a deeper understanding of this complex matter is to proceed, as in this book, by confronting several approaches to a similar problem, in the hope of eliciting an insight to hidden connections. Pierre Feyereisen, Department of Experimental University of Louvain, B-l 348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Psychology,