2009 — 2012 |
Schneider, David Michael [⬀] |
F31Activity Code Description: To provide predoctoral individuals with supervised research training in specified health and health-related areas leading toward the research degree (e.g., Ph.D.). |
Discrimination of Communication Sounds in Auditory Scenes @ Columbia Univ New York Morningside
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Effective vocal communication requires the ability to detect and discriminate vocalizations from a background of distracting sounds. A prominent and effective distractor in human communication is the speech of others. However, even in a crowded room, a listener can focus on a single speaker and ignore the rest of the crowd. This ability to parse an auditory scene is severely impaired in patients with auditory processing disorder (APD), a central auditory system malady that affects as much as 5% of the population. Patients with APD are unable to attend to speech in mildly noisy auditory scenes even though their hearing ranges and thresholds are normal, suggesting that the disorder is one of central auditory circuits rather than of peripheral sensation. Although multiple behavioral therapies are used for treatment of the disorder with varying success, none are informed by an understanding of how neural circuits extract salient vocalizations from complex acoustic environments. The zebra finch is a well-studied animal model of vocal communication. Like humans, zebra finches naturally recognize and discriminate among vocalizations in noisy acoustic environments. The proposed experiments use behavioral, electrophysiological and computational techniques to investigate how vocalizations are encoded, decoded and filtered in the auditory system of the awake, behaving zebra finch. The specific aims of these experiments are to study 1) whether perceptual priming influences birds'abilities to discriminate in auditory scenes;2) how well behaving animals and single neurons discriminate among vocalizations embedded in a distracting background;and 3) whether neural activity more closely tracks the sensation or the perception of degraded vocalizations. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: By understanding how single neurons and neural circuits process communication sounds, we can begin to develop data-driven approaches for treating central auditory disorders such as APD. These experiments should yield informative principles for understanding how neural circuits encode complex sensory signals and how noisy sensory information is filtered to create a behaviorally meaningful neural representation of the sensory world.
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0.908 |
2020 — 2021 |
Schneider, David Michael [⬀] |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Auditory Cortical Processing of Self-Generated Sounds
Project Summary Even if you?re not a musical genius, each and every one of us is still a highly acoustic person. Speech and music are the most obvious sounds we make. But almost every other movement we make produces sounds, too (typing, walking, chewing, shutting a car door). In fact, navigating the world requires us to be able to detect, recognize, and predict the sounds of our own actions. The fact that we don?t notice most of the sounds we make speaks wonders to how well our brains can predict them in the first place. Malfunctioning of the same brain circuitry that normally anticipates the sounds of our actions has been implicated and disorders including tinnitus and schizophrenia. Understanding how the brain learns to anticipate the sounds of our actions is therefore key to understanding brain function during both health and disease. This proposal describes experiments aimed at understanding how auditory and motor systems interact during sound generating behaviors to anticipate the sounds our movements make. The experiments outlined in this proposal incorporate a host of innovative techniques. These include closed-loop augmented reality, large scale physiological recordings during behavior, calcium imaging, and optogenetics. The results of these experiments will help us understand how circuits of neurons within the brain learn to anticipate the sounds our movements make. The significance of the proposed research to the NIH mission is four-fold. First, this research can inform how the nervous system mediates normal hearing during sound-generating movements, which is essential to speech comprehension and learning, among other skilled, auditory-guided behaviors (e.g. musicianship). Second, dysfunction of this motor to auditory interaction at the cortical level is thought to drive auditory hallucinations in diseases including tinnitus and schizophrenia; characterizing motor-auditory interactions is a necessary step to understand the genesis of these pathologies and to ultimately design appropriate therapies. Third, an understanding of how motor-auditory circuits change with experience may provide insights into how these circuits can be manipulated either through perceptual training or direct manipulation of neural activity to facilitate auditory comprehension in the face of hearing loss.
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0.979 |