Topic: auditory system

How our senses work both separately and together involves rich computational problems. I will discuss the spatial and representational problems faced by the visual and auditory system, focusing on two issues. 1. How does the brain correct for discrepancies in the visual and auditory spatial reference frames? I will describe our recent discovery of a novel type of otoacoustic emission, the eye movement related eardrum oscillation, or EMREO (Gruters et al, PNAS 2018). 2. How does the brain encode more than one stimulus at a time? I will discuss evidence for neural time-division multiplexi

How does the brain decode the meaning of sound signals, such as music and courtship songs? We believe that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an ideal model for answering this question, as it offers a comprehensive range of tools and assays which allow us to dissect the mechanisms underlying sound perception and evaluation in the brain. During the courtship behavior, male fruit flies emit “courtship songs” by vibrating their wings. Interestingly, the fly song has a species-specific rhythm, which indeed increases the female’s receptivity for copulation as well as male’s courtship behavior

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 models have focused on supervised learning, in which the auditory system is calibrated by exactly matching feedback signals from the precise visual system. But such cross-sensory calibration is not always feasible. It is unclear how to calibrate the auditory map when