Event

NACS Seminar: Dr. Yale Cohen, Mechanisms Underlying Auditory Perception and Decision-Making

Friday, March 10, 2017
10:15 a.m.
Bioscience Research Building 1103
Blaze Buck
bbuck@umd.edu
https://nacs.umd.edu/sites/nacs.umd.edu/files/Cohen_Flyer.pdf

Mechanisms Underlying Auditory Perception and Decision-Making 

Dr. Yale Cohen
University of Pennsylvania

Host: Dr. Jonathan Fritz, Dr. Bob Slevc

The fundamental problem in audition is determining the mechanisms required by the brain to transform an unlabelled mixture of auditory stimuli into coherent perceptual representations. This process is called auditory-scene analysis. The perceptual representations that result from auditoryscene analysis are formed through a complex interaction of perceptual grouping, attention, categorization and decision-making. Despite a great deal of scientific energy devoted to understanding these aspects of hearing, we still do not understand (1) how sound perception arises from neural activity and (2) the causal relationship between neural activity and sound perception. We hypothesize that, in the early parts of the ventral auditory pathway, neural activity reflects the auditory properties of a stimulus. However, in latter parts of the auditory cortex, neurons encode the sensory evidence that forms an auditory decision and are causally involved in the decision process. Finally, in the prefrontal cortex, which receives input from the auditory cortex, neural activity reflects the actual perceptual decision. Together, these studies indicate that the ventral pathway contains hierarchical circuits that are specialized for auditory perception and scene analysis.