MASKING IN THE AUDITORY SYSTEM

听觉系统中的掩蔽

• 批准号: 6624777
• 负责人: TERRY T TAKAHASHI
• 金额: $ 22.61万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-12-01 至 2003-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6624777
• 关键词: auditory cortex; auditory discrimination; auditory stimulus; behavioral /social science research tag; binaural hearing; electrophysiology; evoked potentials; inferior colliculus; neural information processing; noise; owls; perceptual maskings; psychoacoustics; sound perception

Our laboratory's long-term goal is to understand how the auditory system allows us to listen selectively to the sound of interest amidst sources of interference. Using the auditory system of the barn owl (Tyto alba), with its topographic maps of space, we have been studying the effects of background noise and echoes on spatial resolution. Auditory events, however, generally unfold in time, and the auditory system must keep track of temporal changes in the features of sounds. In this project, we ask: How well does the auditory system encode time-varying signals in a cluttered environment? Behaviorally salient cues in the owl's environment, such as sounds of prey and many of its vocalizations (e.g, the threat call) consist of broadband signals with complex temporal structure. The neurons of the bran owl's inferior colliculus were recently found to adept at tracking the temporal structure of such complex waveforms in addition to being selective for the source's location. In this project, we examined how this temporal firing pattern is affected by noise. Parallel studies of behavior and neurophysiology are carried out in Aims 1 and 2, and in Aim 3, we combine the two methods in a novel attempt to record neuronal responses from the awake, behaving bird.

我们实验室的长期目标是了解听觉系统如何允许我们在干扰源中选择性地聆听感兴趣的声音。利用谷仓猫头鹰(Tyto Alba)的听觉系统及其空间地形图，我们一直在研究背景噪声和回声对空间分辨率的影响。然而，听觉事件通常是在时间上展开的，听觉系统必须跟踪声音特征的时间变化。在这个项目中，我们问：在杂乱的环境中，听觉系统对时变信号的编码能力如何？猫头鹰环境中的行为显著信号，如猎物的声音和它的许多发声(例如，威胁叫声)由具有复杂时间结构的宽带信号组成。最近发现，布朗猫头鹰下丘的神经元不仅擅长追踪这种复杂波形的时间结构，还对来源的位置具有选择性。在这个项目中，我们研究了噪声是如何影响这种时间放电模式的。在目标1和目标2中，对行为和神经生理学进行了平行的研究，在目标3中，我们结合了这两种方法，以一种新颖的尝试记录清醒的、行为正常的鸟的神经元反应。