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Neuroscience Graduate Program at UCSF
Representation of Complex Signals in the Central Auditory System
Our understanding of the neural bases of the higher brain functions underlying human speech and language is still very limited. We apply electrophysiological and neuroanatomical methods in combination with psychophysical, behavioral and computational techniques to study the transformation of distributed sound encoding in the central auditory system of carnivores and primates. Behaviorally relevant signals, such as environmental sounds, vocalizations, speech, and music, have a very complex composition of their spectrum that changes rapidly over time. This inherent complexity and variability of sounds has proven to be very challenging for the systematic exploration of the mechanisms underlying signal identification and classification.
To delineate the organizational principles in the central auditory representation of complex signals, we have chosen to analyze advanced spectro-temporal receptive field properties with dynamic noise-like stimuli, animal vocalizations and speech. We compare their distributions in the auditory thalamus and across auditory cortical fields. With this approach we have been able to identify a number of superimposed but independent systematic signal representations, including for frequency modulation, spectral integration, and signal intensity. Based on these identified organizational principles, we can study their neural substrate, contributing local circuitries, and emerging processing properties (such as object formation and robustness in noisy environments).
Further, we utilize the influence of representational cortical plasticity on the central coding of sounds by training animals to attend to specific classes of sounds. From the emerging selective representations of those sound classes in the cortex and the animals behavioral performance we can infer in animal models some of the principles that underlie the central manifestation of well known psychophysical attributes such as pitch, loudness, timbre, as well as that of speech perception attributes, e.g. categorical perception and phoneme recognition.
- Electrophysiological and optical studies of distributed representations of sounds in auditory cortex of cats and squirrel monkeys
- Receptive field properties and plasticity of auditory cortical neurons assessed with whole-cell recordings
-Receptive field transformations between thalamus and cortex and between cortical laminae of cat and squirrel monkey auditory cortex
-Effect of noise and reverberation on coding of sound in auditory cortex and the perceptual performance of monkeys
-Neuroanatomical foundation of modular functional organization of auditory cortex
- Effects of hearing loss on central auditory coding
Craig Atencio
Postdoctoral Fellow
Ralph Beitel
Specialist
Patrick Hullett
Graduate Student
Brian Malone
Assistant Research Physiologist
Jonathan Shih
Graduate Student
Bryan Seybold
Graduate Student
Kexin Yuan
Postdoctoral Fellow
Link to Publications via PubMed
C.A. Atencio, T. Sharpee, C.E. Schreiner: Cooperative nonlinearities in auditor cortical neurons. Neuron 58:956-966, 2008.
S.W. Cheung, B. H. Bonham, C.E. Schreiner,B. Godey, D. Copenhaver: Realignment of interaural cortical maps in asymmetric hearing loss. J. Neurosci 29:7095-7078, 2009.
C.A. Atencio, T. Sharpee, C.E. Schreiner: Hierarchical Computation in the Canonical Auditory Cortical Circuit. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A 106:21894-21899, 2009.
C.A. Atencio, C.E. Schreiner: Laminar diversity of dynamic sound processing in cat primary auditory cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 103:192-205, 2010.
C.A. Atencio, C.E. Schreiner: Columnar connectivity and laminar processing in cat primary auditory cortex. PLoS One e9521, 2010.
A. Dorrn, K. Yuan, A. Barker, C.E. Schreiner, R.C. Froemke: Developmental sensory experience balances cortical excitation and inhibition. Nature (in press), 2010.
Christoph Schreiner, M.D./Ph.D.
Phone
415-476-2591
Physical Address
513 Parnassus
HSE-824
Mailing Address
UCSF, 513 Parnassus Box 0732
San Francisco, CA 94143-0732
For Internal Campus Mail
Box 0732
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