Audiology ePosters

To discern speech or appreciate music, the human auditory system detects how pitch increases or decreases over time. However, the algorithms used to detect changes in pitch, or pitch motion, are incompletely understood. Here, using psychophysics, computational modeling, functional neuroimaging, and analysis of…

The ability to accurately localize sound sources is crucial for human and other animals. An important question is: how could the brain calibrate its space map in response to changes to acoustic cues during a lifetime (e.g. in development, aging, sensory loss)? Currently we still lack a comprehensive answer. Existing…

Perceivers benefit from integrating their prior beliefs with sensory signals based on their relative reliability to mitigate the effects of stochastic noise. However, in volatile environments, one should avoid integrating these signals when changes in the signal source render their prior beliefs irrelevant. Bayesian…

The vestibular organ is an integral sensory systems designed to provide afferent information to the brain. Once integrated, efferent signals are transmitted to produce a motor output associated with gaze stabilization through compensatory eye movements, postural adjustments, and maintenance of static and dynamic…

Adaptive myelination is the emerging concept of tuning axonal conduction velocity to the activity within specific neural circuits over time. Sound processing circuits process signals with microsecond precision: a time scale that is amenable to adjustment in length and thickness of myelin. Sound-evoked responses during…

Glycinergic synapses between the medial nucleus of the trapezoid body (MNTB) and the lateral superior olive (LSO) are involved in sound source localization. These synapses can reliably transmit inhibitory signals, even during minutes of high-frequency activation. Glycine transporter 2 (GlyT2) is involved in glycine…

Exploring novel approaches to auditory rehabilitation, we aim to demonstrate, in mice, the efficiency of an optogenetic cortical implant. Several studies have shown that mice can use patterned optogenetic stimulations of the sensory cortex to drive their behaviour. It was however never tested if it is possible to…

The human auditory system is robust to many types of corrupting noise. However, the neural mechanism that drives this robustness is unclear. Experimental evidence suggests that top-down predictions play an important role in processing stimuli in noisy contexts. Feedback connections are abundant in the auditory cortex,…

Listening in the real world involves making sense of mixtures of multiple overlapping sounds. The brain decomposes such scenes into individual objects, and a sequence of related auditory objects forms a stream. We are investigating the role of the auditory cortex in the formation and maintenance of auditory streams.…

Categorical perception of sensory inputs, including human speech, enables adaptive behavior and is thought to emerge in the sensory cortex. There would be significant computational advantages, however, to functional specialization before cortical processing. To what extent do categorical representations emerge earlier…

Cochlear implants (CI) are neuroprostheses that restore hearing for deaf humans by delivering patterned pulses of current to the auditory nerve, bypassing the damaged sensory epithelium of the inner ear. Almost all CI users require adaptation periods to attain speech comprehension, which improves most rapidly in the…

The auditory nerve encodes sound with spike-timing that is phase locked to the fine-grained temporal structure of sound. The precision of this coding substantially exceeds that of any other sensory modality, but its role in hearing remains controversial because physiological mechanisms for extracting information from…