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.
