International Research Fellowship Program: Mechanisms of Auditory Scene Analysis in the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris)

0107304BeeThe国际研究员奖励计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行三到二十四个月的研究。 该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，以及使用国外独特或互补的设施，专业知识和实验条件。与乔治·M博士一起工作。Klump在不莱梅的奥尔登堡大学，德国对欧洲椋鸟的听觉场景分析机制的研究。本研究的目的是获得对听觉场景分析的潜在神经机制的更深入的理解，听觉场景分析是将声音组织成产生声音的事件的感知表征。 PI将研究八哥听觉场景分析的神经基础，八哥是一种鸣禽，是听觉感知行为和神经生物学研究的优秀模型系统。 他将使用一种方法，将微电极长期植入椋鸟的听觉皮层，通过无线电遥测记录清醒、不受约束的鸟类对声音刺激的神经反应。 这些实验将确定听觉前脑的不同形式的听觉场景分析发生的区域，以及这些区域如何完成这项复杂的任务。 这些结果将增加我们对听觉场景分析机制的理解，有助于更好地理解人类语言习得和听觉的进化，并可能导致更好的助听器和基于语音识别的计算机用户界面的开发。Klump博士曾就职于慕尼黑工业大学，是鸟类比较听觉和听觉研究的领先专家，并且是由慕尼黑地区八个研究小组持有的资助的主要研究者，重点研究听觉场景分析的机制。

0107304BeeThe International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will provide twenty-four months of support to Dr. Mark A. Bee to work with Dr. Georg M. Klump at the University of Oldenburg in Bremen, Germany on the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis in the European Starling.The purpose of this research is to gain a greater understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, which is the organization of sounds into perceptual representations of the events that produced the sounds. The PI will study the neural basis of auditory scene analysis in the starling, a songbird that is an excellent model system of behavioral and neurobiological studies of auditory perception. He will use a methodological approach in which microelectrodes are chronically implanted into the starling's auditory cortex and neural responses to acoustic stimuli are recorded from awake, unrestrained birds via radiotelemetry. These experiments will identify areas of the auditory forebrain where different forms of auditory scene analysis occur and how these areas accomplish this complex task. The results will increase our understanding of the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis, contribute to a better understanding of human language acquisition and the evolution of hearing and potentially lead to the development of better hearing aids and voice-recognition-based computer-user interfaces.Dr. Klump, formerly of the University of Technische Universitat Munchen, is a leading expert in the study of comparative audition and hearing in birds, and is the PI on a grant held by eight research groups in the Munich area focussing on the mechanisms of auditory scene analysis.