Abstract:  Ethologically important sounds such as human speech and animal vocalizations are typically produced with tremendous between-subject and inter-trial variability. These sounds are also encountered in highly variable listening environments. A central function of auditory processing is to generalize over this variability and group sounds that carry distinct behavioral meanings into discrete categories. In this talk, I will describe a theoretical model of how such categorization can be achieved in the case of animal vocalizations. Using guinea pigs performing vocalization categorization tasks as an animal model, I will present electrophysiological and behavioral experiments that validate the model. I will then propose a framework for modeling attentional enhancement of sound category representations and describe ongoing experiments to test model predictions using large-scale neural recordings in behaving animals. In summary, these theoretical and experimental results will propose a biologically interpretable hierarchical model of auditory processing in which early acoustic representations are transformed into downstream goal-directed representations that support specific behaviors.

This year’s SHRP schedule is available here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

Titles and abstracts of all SHRP talks are here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts

These seminars are sponsored by the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences at Purdue.