Role of sensory experience in developing multisensory integration

项目摘要 感觉神经科学中一个主要的突出问题是大脑如何发展其非凡的使用能力 以协同的方式将感官结合在一起，以改善感知和行为决策。因为每一种感觉 转换一种不同形式的环境能量，通过合成 与同一事件有关的信号在感觉模态中的变化。然而，存在一种固有的模糊性， 确定哪些信号属于同一事件，哪些属于不同事件（“因果推理”，一种类型的 匹配问题）。也许由于这种模糊性，多感觉整合不是一种先天的 这是大脑的一个特征;相反，它必须从环境中跨模态事件的经验中获得。 大脑如何利用这种经验来解决发展中的因果推理问题尚不清楚。我 假设新生儿的大脑为此目的进行了某种形式的统计学习。它使用的算法 被预测为在特定地点的基础上运行，因此可以使用不同的多感觉组合规则。 在不同的位置发展，这取决于感官体验的具体情况。我假设同样的塑料 成年人体内有这种机制，但运作能力降低。为了研究这些问题， 新生和成年幼稚动物的多感官体验将通过一种特殊的 饲养设施和感觉暴露室，以及电生理和行为的组合 方法将被用来检查多感觉上级丘（SC）的功能特性， 相关皮质（前外侧裂沟，AES）。

PROJECT SUMMARY A major outstanding issue in sensory neuroscience is how the brain develops its remarkable ability to use senses together in synergistic ways to improve perceptual and behavioral decisions. Because each sense transduces a different form of environmental energy, powerful enhancements are obtained by synthesizing signals pertaining to the same event across the sensory modalities. There is an inherent ambiguity, however, in determining which signals belong to the same event, and which to different events (“causal inference”, a type of matching problem). Perhaps as a consequence of this ambiguity, multisensory integration is not an innate feature of the brain; rather, it must be acquired from experience with cross-modal events in the environment. How the brain uses this experience to solve the causal inference problem in development is not known. I hypothesize that the neonatal brain engages a form of statistical learning for this purpose. The algorithm it uses is predicted to operate on a site-specific basis, so that different multisensory combinatoric rules can be developed at different loci depending on the specifics of sensory experience. I postulate that the same plastic mechanisms are in place in the adult, but operate with reduced capacity. To study these questions, multisensory experience of both neonatal and adult naïve animals will be precisely controlled via a special rearing facility and sensory exposure chamber, and a combination of electrophysiological and behavioral methods will be leveraged to examine the functional properties of the multisensory superior colliculus (SC) and associated cortex (the anterior ectosylvian sulcus, AES).