Topic: tonotopy

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 in the auditory hierarchy? To address this, we reasoned that the ideal species would exhibit expert auditory sensing and a rich repertoire of vocalizations, akin to human listening and speech. The big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus, stands out in the animal kingdom for its acoustic

Recent work [Yamins 2014, Bashivan 2019, Bao 2020] has shown that the initial responses of individual neurons in the ventral stream of visual cortex can be predicted with high accuracy by deep neural networks trained on challenging visual classification problems. Similar results have been obtained for voxels of auditory cortex with fMRI [Kell 2018]. But the relatively poor time resolution of fMRI precludes capturing temporal structure below about 1 Hz, which is known to be an important characteristic of auditory processing [Downer 2020]. Here we investigate the relationship between sequences o

Hearing losses are the most prevalent sensory disorder. The hearing organ, the organ of Corti, is located in a bony capsule in the pars petrosa of the temporal bone. Its spiralling morphology makes it difficult to investigate the cellular mechanism of hearing. The cells provide morphological and physiological differences, called tonotopy, which is the base of the frequency selectivity. The supporting cells have similar variability to the receptor cells, however they receive little attention. One type of the supporting cells are the Deiters cells which are in close connection with the outer hai