Jose L Pena Lab

Research

 

Research Interests 

Hearing relies on the brain’s ability to represent auditory information. We use multiple approaches to investigate this function in owls and chicken. Birds are not just fascinating creatures but offer advantages for understanding the neural coding and computations underlying hearing.
 
 

Projects 

Brain representation of auditory space: The biased owl   

Although owls can very accurately localize sounds near the center of gaze, they underestimate the direction of sources in the periphery.  This behavioral bias is also observed in other animals and in humans. This behavior and the underlying neural implementation can be predicted by statistical inference; Brian Fischer showed that the mapping of auditory space in the owl’s midbrain could explain how statistical inference takes place. These conditions are likely in other cases, as shown by studies of the oblique effect in visual perception in humans. To perform statistical inference, it is critical that the brain represents the relationship between sensory information and the environment, as well as the statistics of the environment. We plan to elucidate how this happens in collaboration with Brian Fischer and Terry Takahashi.