Workshop 5: Auditory System (May 5-9, 2003)
Organizers: Catherine Carr and John Rinzel
The timing of firing of auditory neurons carries information used for both localization and interpretation of sound. Psychophysical studies strongly support the existence of a timing code for localization and pitch detection, while broadband transients and gaps are critical features of speech consonants. In order to understand speech, we must understand how sound is processed in the central auditory system. Mathematical modeling and computer simulation already play a significant role in auditory research, but further intensive effort is needed to understand how the spectro-temporal information present in the cochlea nuclei is used for localization and interpretation of sound. The workshop will focus on the following topics:
- ITD coding: Binaural processing has seen a resurgence of interest lately. This is mainly due to the progress in the understanding of the computational mechanisms underlying the representation of interaural time difference (ITD) in small mammals. It now is possible to compare these new results with results from larger mammals (including humans), and from the barn owl that so far have been the most established model systems to study binaural processing.
- Complex sound processing: Real sounds are complex and we do not know how they are coded or decoded. Recent work shows that the auditory signal is divided into parallel streams for information transmission, which may be governed by different mechanisms. Spectral temporal receptive field (STRF) analyses of the auditory signal in higher centers (bird forebrain and mammalian cortex) has provided descriptions of the stimulus-response function of auditory neurons. In songbirds, where salient stimulus is well known, there are successively complex functional stages of song analysis by neurons in the auditory forebrain. Similar results have been obtained in studies of marmoset vocalization. Comparisons of neural responses in A1 of marmosets and cats have shown that the preference for natural marmoset twitter calls in marmoset A1 was absent in cat A1. This differential representation of marmoset vocalizations in two cortices suggests that experience-dependent and possibly species-specific mechanisms are involved in cortical processing of communication sounds.
- Spatial processing: The real world presents a dynamic and complex auditory scene. We want to understand how the brain can build separate perceptual descriptions of sound-generating events despite the mixing of signals at the two ears. All hearing vertebrates carry out auditory scene analysis, where they group such as the call of a particular monkey continuing over time, or the echo of a flying insect. This is a problem of general relevance.
The goals of the workshop are to increase the communication and cooperation between experimentalists and modelers and to introduce mathematicians with little previous experience in this area to the wide range of interesting mathematical problems in the auditory science.
The mathematical areas which are expected to be strongly involved in this workshop are information theory, Fourier analysis, statistics, differential equations and real analysis.
Schedule |
Monday, May 5 | ||
| 9:15-9:30AM | Avner Friedman | ||
| 9:30-10:30AM | Benedikt Grothe | ||
| 11:00-12:00PM | Phil Joris | ||
| 12:00-12:30PM | Dan Sanes | ||
| 12:30-2:30PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30-3:30PM | Ian Forsythe | ||
| 3:30-4:00PM | Ranjan Batra | ||
| 4:00-5:00PM | MBI Reception | ||
| Moderators | Catherine Carr & Laurel Carney | ||
| Tuesday, May 6 | |||
| 9:30-10:30AM | Bill Spain | ||
| 11:00-12:00PM | John Rinzel | ||
| 12:00-12:30PM | Helen Brew | ||
| 12:30-2:30PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30-3:30PM | Tony Burkitt | ||
| 3:30-4:00PM | Torsten Marquardt | ||
| 4:00-5:00PM | Discussion | ||
| 5:00-7:00PM | Postdoc Reception and Poster Session | ||
| Moderators | Dan Sanes & John Middlebrooks | ||
| Wednesday, May 7 | |||
| 9:30-10:30AM | David Poeppel | ||
| 11:00-12:00PM | Monty Escabi | ||
| 12:00-12:30PM | John Middlebrooks | ||
| 12:30-2:30PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30-3:30PM | Xiaoqin Wang | ||
| 3:30-4:00PM | Leo van Hemmen | ||
| 4:00-4:30PM | Laurel Carney | ||
| Moderators | Tom Yin & Benedikt Grothe | ||
| Thursday, May 8 | |||
| 9:30-10:30PM | Frederic Theunissen | ||
| 11:00-12:00PM | Mal Semple | ||
| 12:00-12:30PM | Heather Read | ||
| 12:30-2:30PM | Lunch Break | ||
| 2:30-3:30PM | Israel Nelken | ||
| 3:30-4:30PM | Discussion | ||
| 6:00-9:00PM | Workshop Dinner | ||
| Moderators | David Poeppel & Laurel Carney | ||
| Friday, May 9 | |||
| 9:00-10:00AM | Terry Takahashi | ||
| 10:00-10:30AM | Jonathan Simon | ||
| 10:30-11:00AM | Peter Cariani | ||
| Moderator | John Rinzel | ||
