Re: Pitch orientation-discriminating feature detectors?

[Peter Meijer <peter.b.l.meijer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bret Aarden wrote

> I recently heard a talk by Shihab Shamma on the work his lab at the
> University of Maryland has been doing with ferrets. They found
> primary auditory cortex cells with preferential response to various
> frequency change rates and directions, and various bandwidths.

Interesting! What about the detection of sudden changes in
frequency change rates? In the visual domain, humans can
easily notice a sudden and even relatively small change in
slope of an otherwise monotonically rising or falling line
(a "kink"), but this seems to be a lot harder in the auditory
domain for sounds that have the above visual "scene" as their
spectrogram. Would feature detectors for that arise in ferrets
(through neural plasticity or whatever) if they started early
enough in life while getting exposed to the relevant auditory
stimuli plus maybe some reward mechanism?

Best regards,

Peter Meijer


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com