A multi-species, multi-scale approach to understanding how attention modulates sound processing during active listening

Jennifer Bizley (primary)
Ear Institute
University College London
Fred Dick (secondary)
Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck

Abstract

Attention is critical to our ability to listen and communicate effectively. This project will determine the mechanisms by which feature-based attention shapes the processing of sound to understand how we are able to ‘tune in’ to a particular sound in a mixture.  We will train human and ferrets in an identical task that requires they track an attended stream in a mixture. During behavior we will record single neuron responses and local field potentials in ferrets, and use EEG and fMRI in humans to record neural activity across spatial scales.


References

  1. Mesgarani and Chang, 2012, Selective cortical representation of attended speaker in multi-talker perception, Nature. PMID: 22522927
  2. Fritz et al., 2003 Rapid task related plasticity of spectro-temporal receptive fields in primary auditory cortex. Nature Neuroscience. PMID: 14583754
  3. Bizley and Cohen, 2013 The what, where and how of auditory object formation, Nature Reviews Neuroscience. PMID: 24052177
  4. Dick et al., 2012, In Vivo Functional and Myeloarchitectonic Mapping of Human Primary Auditory Areas. Journal of Neuroscience 32:16095–16105.
  5. Shamma S, Fritz J (2014) Adaptive auditory computations. Curr Opin Neurobiol 25:164–168.

BBSRC Area
Animal disease, health and welfare
Area of Biology
NeurobiologyPhysiology
Techniques & Approaches
Mathematics / StatisticsMicroscopy / ElectrophysiologySimulation / Modelling