Sensitivity to voice in human prefrontal cortex

We report two functional MRI (fMRI) experiments showing sensitivity to human voice in a region of human left inferior prefrontal cortex, pars orbitalis. The voice-enhanced response was observed for speech as well as non-linguistic vocalizations and was stronger for emotional than neutral vocalizations. This region could constitute a human prefrontal auditory domain similar to the one recently identified in the macaque brain.