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Dear All, Just to remind you that we will be joined by Dr Kerry Walker, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford on Thursday.
Thursday 8th September at 2.00 pm via Teams Details for this talk are below: “Hearing in an acoustically varied world” Abstract:
In order for animals to thrive in their complex environments, their sensory systems must form representations of objects that are invariant to changes in some dimensions of their physical cues. For example, we can recognize a friend’s speech in a forest,
a small office, and a cathedral, even though the sound reaching our ears will be vary across these 3 environments. I will discuss our recent experiments into how neurons in auditory cortex can form stable representations of sounds in this acoustically varied
world. Our 2-photon calcium imaging studies in ferrets have provided new insights into the complex frequency receptive fields of auditory cortical neurons, and how these are topographically organized. Our electrophysiological work has further revealed how
complex auditory objects are represented invariantly across listening environments. We use a normative computational model of hearing to examine how the brain may recognize a sound source across rooms with different levels of reverberation. The model predicted
that reverberations can be removed from the original sound by delaying the inhibitory component of spectrotemporal receptive fields in the presence of stronger reverberation. Our electrophysiological recordings confirmed that neurons in ferret auditory cortex
apply this algorithm to adapt to different room sizes. Our results demonstrate that this neural process is dynamic and adaptive. These studies provide new insights into how we can recognize complex auditory objects, even in highly reverberant environments. Biography:
Kerry Walker studied Neuroscience as an undergraduate and Master’s student in Canada, before moving to Oxford for her DPhil. She is now an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, at the University of Oxford.
Her group uses a combination of behavioural, computational and neurophysiological methods to understand how sounds are encoded in auditory cortex. Her work has provided important insights into how pitch is processed by humans and animals, and the importance
of the timing of spikes in encoding sound. She is currently looking to hire a Postdoctoral Research Scientist to help examine how auditory cortical neurons adapt to sound statistics, so please send her an email if you are interested in joining her group. https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/kerry-walker Please use the following link to join the seminar on Teams -
Click
here to join the meeting Best wishes, Joe 2.00 pm / 14:00 (BST) 3.00 pm / 15:00 (CEST)) 6.00 am / 06:00 (USA Pacific) 8.00 am / 08:00 (USA Central) 9.00 am / 09:00 (USA Eastern) 9.00 pm / 21:00 (CST/China Standard Time) Dr Joseph Sollini Auditory Circuits Lab Hearing Sciences Mental Health and Clinical Neuroscience, School of Medicine The University of Nottingham W:
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/hearingsciences/people/joseph.sollini W:
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