Talk #77, 1/30/13

 

A Bird’s Eye View of Auditory Cognition

 

Dr. Tim Gentner
Associate Director, Neurosciences Graduate Program
Faculty Fellow, The Kavli Mind-Brain Institute
University of California San Diego

 

The fully detailed complexity of the natural world can easily overwhelm the processing capacity of any sensory system. To compensate, sensory systems adapt, over long timescales though learning and short timescales with attention, to bias the representation of stimulus features, objects, and patterns that carry significant behavioral meaning. Professor Gentner will review results of recent experiments from his laboratory that examine the neural mechanisms for learning and selective attention in auditory cortex. He will describe how these basic cognitive processes interact to shape encoding in single neurons and populations, and show how attention directly modulates the responses on individual cortical neurons in real time.

 

The following is a link to the presentation (pdf file extension).

Presentation, Part1
Presentation, Part2
Presentation, Part3
Presentation, Part4