NEURAL DYNAMICS OF INNATE PUP CALL PROCESSING IN THE MATERNAL AUDITORY CIRCUIT

Infant vocalizations convey ethologically critical information that must be extracted rapidly and reliably by the brain. In mammals, pup distress calls elicit robust maternal responses, yet the neural dynamics underlying their selective processing remain unclear. Here we investigate whether the auditory cortex possesses innate, specialized circuits for processing these vocalizations. Using in vivo electrophysiology in awake mice, we recorded neuronal activity in the primary auditory cortex during presentation of natural pup calls and acoustically matched control sounds. Although only a small fraction of individual neurons showed significant call-evoked responses, indicating sparse single-neuron encoding, population activity exhibited structured, low-dimensional patterns that clearly separated pup calls from control stimuli. This separation was not explained by changes in mean firing rates, but instead emerged from coordinated population dynamics across neurons. These results demonstrate that pup calls are encoded through distributed population-level dynamics in the auditory cortex, consistent with the presence of preconfigured circuit mechanisms tuned to behaviorally relevant spectrotemporal features, even in the absence of prior caregiving experience.