Review
Neurosciences
Matthias Staib, Sascha Fruhholz
Summary: The study found that the temporal voice area (TVA) shows similar neural responses to textural sound patterns (TSPs) as to natural voice and non-voice sounds, partially explaining activation patterns typically observed during voice processing. This suggests that the human voice area does not only process higher-order voice information, but also evaluates the perceptual and acoustic quality of non-voice sounds, responding to them with a voice-like processing pattern when detecting some rudimentary perceptual similarity with voices.
PROGRESS IN NEUROBIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Michael S. Borland, Elizabeth P. Buell, Jonathan R. Riley, Alan M. Carroll, Nicole A. Moreno, Pryanka Sharma, Katelyn M. Grasse, John M. Buell, Michael P. Kilgard, Crystal T. Engineer
Summary: Pairing sound contrasts with VNS can significantly influence neural activity in the auditory pathway, leading to increased response strength and discriminability. However, pairing VNS with only one sound does not have the same effect on neural responses. Understanding the impact of different sound contrasts and neural activity patterns on plasticity could have important clinical implications for treating auditory processing disorders.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Biology
Aleksandar Z. Ivanov, Andrew J. King, Ben D. B. Willmore, Kerry M. M. Walker, Nicol S. Harper
Summary: This study investigates how the auditory system copes with reverberation by examining the responses of auditory cortical neurons in ferrets. The results show that auditory cortical neurons adapt to reverberation by adjusting their filtering properties, leading to dereverberation.
Review
Neurosciences
Mor Harpaz, Maciej M. Jankowski, Leila Khouri, Israel Nelken
Summary: The study investigated the emergence of representation of sounds as wholes in the auditory system using stimulus-specific adaptation. The results showed differences in the representation of sounds in different parts of the auditory pathway, with the primary auditory cortex representing sound as abstract entities while other parts mainly representing them in terms of frequency components.
PROGRESS IN NEUROBIOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Nicholas J. Audette, WenXi Zhou, Alessandro La Chioma, David M. Schneider
Summary: Many sensations experienced by an organism are caused by its own actions. Accurately predicting the sensory features and timing of self-generated stimuli is crucial for various behaviors. Research has shown that neural responses to self-generated sounds in the auditory cortex exhibit frequency-specific suppression, suggesting that movement-based predictions may occur early in sensory processing.
Review
Neurosciences
Sarah Elizabeth Rotschafer
Summary: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly common, with altered sensory processing, especially auditory sensitivities, being typical. Individuals with ASD often show heightened sensitivity to environmental sounds and have difficulty tolerating loud sounds, which may contribute to impairments in language comprehension and sound discrimination. Event-related potential tests have revealed altered cortical activity in individuals with ASD, which likely plays a role in the observed processing impairments.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Patrick A. Cody, Thanos Tzounopoulos
Summary: Neural adaptation allows the brain to efficiently process sensory signals despite changes in background noise. In the auditory pathway, contrast in background sound levels leads to different neural responses, but mean firing-rates in auditory cortex remain unaffected by sound level contrast. The neuromodulatory mechanisms behind these phenomena are still unknown.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Hohyun Cho, Yvonne M. Fonken, Markus Adamek, Richard Jimenez, Jack J. Lin, Gerwin Schalk, Robert T. Knight, Peter Brunner
Summary: By assessing the response to omitted expected sounds, we found that high-frequency band activity (HFA) overlaps with auditory-active regions in the posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG), suggesting its central role in implementing predictions in the auditory environment.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Daniel T. Smith, Ulrik Beierholm, Mark Avery
Summary: Saccadic eye movements are accompanied by significant changes in visual perception, which can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'forward remapping'. This study investigates the perceptual consequences of remapping in the blindspot area and finds that there is a significant impairment in perception at the post-saccadic location of the blindspot.
Article
Chemistry, Analytical
Daniel Schmid, Timo Oess, Heiko Neumann
Summary: Conventional processing of sensory input often results in redundant information and unnecessary resource consumption. Neuromorphic computing, inspired by biology, introduces distributed event-based hardware to challenge these conventions. This study proposes a generic approach to map biologically inspired neural networks onto neuromorphic hardware for lateral auditory sound source localization (SSL). By modeling the neural mechanisms of SSL and transforming them into spike-based components, the proposed approach allows for successful implementation on different platforms, as demonstrated by experiments on synthetic and real-world data.
Article
Neurosciences
Luciana Lopez-Jury, Francisco Garcia-Rosales, Eugenia Gonzalez-Palomares, Manfred Koessl, Julio C. Hechavarria
Summary: Research demonstrates that the presence of acoustic context changes the neuronal discriminability of echolocation and communication calls in awake bats' cortex. It shows that nonselective neurons become category selective with leading context, while neurons preferring communication sounds become nonselective with context. The overall response suppression due to context is stimulus specific and can last up to 1.5 seconds after context offset.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Yuan Cheng, Ruru Chen, Bowen Su, Guimin Zhang, Yutian Sun, Pengying An, Yue Fang, Yifan Zhang, Ye Shan, Etienne de Villers-Sidani, Yunfeng Wang, Xiaoming Zhou
Summary: Antidepressants can have negative effects on auditory processing, worsening psychiatric symptoms. These drugs can affect auditory memory, cortical neuron response, and perineuronal nets. Pairing drug treatment with enriched sound exposure can help alleviate these effects. These findings are important for understanding the impact of antidepressants on hearing and developing new treatment strategies for psychiatric disorders.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Cell Biology
Joonyeup Lee, Gideon Rothschild
Summary: The study revealed that in the auditory cortex of behaving mice, Off-responses encode preceding sound sequences and learning to associate a sound sequence with a reward enhances Off-responses. Learning also improves the network-level discriminability of sound sequences by Off-responses.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Amber M. Kline, Destinee A. Aponte, Hiroaki Tsukano, Andrea Giovannucci, Hiroyuki K. Kato
Summary: The integration of multi-frequency sounds in the mouse secondary auditory cortex A2 is crucial for vocal processing. A specific subnetwork of neurons in A2 encodes harmonic sounds and is stable across days, possibly forming during development. Inactivation of A2 impairs performance in a discrimination task for coincident harmonics.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Biology
Liping Yu, Jiawei Hu, Chenlin Shi, Li Zhou, Maozhi Tian, Jiping Zhang, Jinghong Xu
Summary: The study demonstrates the essential role of auditory cortex in information encoding and maintenance during an auditory working memory task, particularly in the early delay period.
Review
Engineering, Biomedical
Xiang Zhang, Lina Yao, Xianzhi Wang, Jessica Monaghan, David McAlpine, Yu Zhang
Summary: Brain signals are biometric information collected from the human brain for decoding the underlying neurological or physical status of individuals. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the study of brain signals. This work presents a taxonomy of non-invasive brain signals, basics of deep learning algorithms, frontiers of applying deep learning for non-invasive brain signals analysis, and potential real-world applications.
JOURNAL OF NEURAL ENGINEERING
(2021)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Jaime A. Undurraga, Lindsey Van Yper, Manohar Bance, David McAlpine, Deborah Vickers
Summary: The study found that CI listeners are sensitive to changes in both spectral and temporal domains, but their cortical responses are impaired when spectral or temporal cues are alternated at faster rates. Additionally, limitations in the ability to process dynamic spectro-temporal cues may impact speech comprehension in CI users.
Article
Neurosciences
Andrew Brughera, Jason Mikiel-Hunter, Mathias Dietz, David McAlpine
Summary: This study investigates the mechanism behind the emphasis of ITD cues in early-arriving sound in the auditory process, revealing a higher ITD transmission weight in 600 Hz sound. The model experiments suggest that adaptation and binaural coincidence detection within MSO neurons play crucial roles in this process.
JARO-JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH IN OTOLARYNGOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Nutrition & Dietetics
Diana Tang, Yvonne Tran, Joshua R. Lewis, Nicola P. Bondonno, Catherine P. Bondonno, Jonathan M. Hodgson, Deepti Domingo, David McAlpine, George Burlutsky, Paul Mitchell, Giriraj S. Shekhawat, Bamini Gopinath
Summary: This study examines the associations between dietary flavonoid intake and the incidence of tinnitus over a 10-year period. The results suggest that there is no significant correlation between dietary flavonoid intake and the development of tinnitus.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NUTRITION
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Biomedical
Matthieu Recugnat, Jaime A. Undurraga, David McAlpine
Summary: The purpose of this study is to develop a biophysical model of human spiral ganglion neurons that incorporates voltage-gated HCN channels and KLT channels to simulate spike-rate adaptation. The mode of stimulation was found to affect spike-rate adaptation, with extracellular stimulation leading to a greater reduction in spiking compared to intracellular stimulation. However, the time-constants of spike-rate adaptation did not match the predicted responses based on in vivo data, highlighting the need for a more complete physiological understanding.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Andrew Brughera, Jimena A. Ballestero, David McAlpine
Summary: The study reveals the variability in sensitivity to ITDENV in human listeners to amplitude-modulated sound. It shows that the decrease in sensitivity to ITDENV with increasing carrier frequency, and the differences in sensitivity across populations and modulation rates, are attributed to the decreasing range of membrane frequency responses in LSO neurons.
JARO-JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR RESEARCH IN OTOLARYNGOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Robert Luke, Hamish Innes-Brown, Jaime A. Undurraga, David McAlpine
Summary: Sounds generated by different sources are received as a mixture of energy. Listeners can distinguish different sources by extracting cues, including interaural coherence (IAC), which is how similar sounds arrive at the two ears. The study found that listeners cannot reliably distinguish two completely interaurally coherent sounds from a single sound with reduced IAC. The perception of sounds with supra-ethological spatial cues as more diffuse is accounted for by a computational model, and sounds with low IAC impose elevated cortical load.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Caroline T. Golden, Paul Chadderton
Summary: This study investigated the neural effects of psilocybin in awake mice using multi-unit extracellular recordings. The findings suggest that psilocybin reduces the power of low frequency oscillations, increases overall firing rates of neurons, and desynchronizes local neural activity.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Amanda M. Fullerton, Deborah A. Vickers, Robert Luke, Addison N. Billing, David McAlpine, Heivet Hernandez-Perez, Jonathan E. Peelle, Jessica J. M. Monaghan, Catherine M. McMahon
Summary: This study aims to understand the responses and functional connectivity of auditory and visual cortices to speech and non-speech stimuli in postlingually deaf cochlear implant users and found that they show beneficial effects in cross-modal activity. Specifically, an increase in connectivity between the left auditory and visual cortices is positively correlated with their abilities to understand speech in background noise.
Article
Biochemical Research Methods
Chris Barkus, Caroline Bergmann, Tiago Branco, Matteo Carandini, Paul T. Chadderton, Gregorio L. Galinanes, Gary Gilmour, Daniel Huber, John R. Huxter, Adil G. Khan, Andrew J. King, Miguel Maravall, Tina O'Mahony, C. Ian Ragan, Emma S. J. Robinson, Andreas T. Schaefer, Simon R. Schultz, Frank Sengpiel, Mark J. Prescott
Summary: This article summarizes the current practices of head fixation in research, providing recommendations to improve animal welfare and data quality. It also discusses alternative methods that do not require restraint.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE METHODS
(2022)
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Xusheng Zhao, Jia Wu, Hao Peng, Amin Beheshti, Jessica J. M. Monaghan, David McAlpine, Heivet Hernandez-Perez, Mark Dras, Qiong Dai, Yangyang Li, Philip S. Yu, Lifang He
Summary: In this study, a novel brain network representation framework, called BN-GNN, is proposed to tackle the challenges in brain network analysis. The framework utilizes deep reinforcement learning to automatically predict the optimal number of feature propagations for each brain network and improves the performance in multiple brain network disease analysis tasks.
Review
Neurosciences
Joaquin T. Valderrama, Angel De la Torre, David McAlpine
Summary: Many individuals have hidden hearing problems that lack sensitive non-invasive biomarkers and standardized treatment protocols. Animal models provide evidence for hidden hearing loss, but its existence in humans remains inconclusive. New research tools may help overcome barriers in diagnosing and treating HHL.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Diana Lucaci, Xiao Yu, Paul Chadderton, William Wisden, Stephen G. Brickley
Summary: We investigated the effects of histamine and GABA release from TMN axons projecting to the PFC on circuit processing. Histamine stimulated fast-spiking interneurons, while released GABA enhanced tonic inhibition on PyrNs. Histamine-induced gain changes were blocked by histamine receptor antagonists, while GABA-induced gain changes were blocked by GABAA receptor antagonists. The GABA modulation of PyrN excitability by TMNHDC axons increased significantly in older mice, potentially enhancing information processing and maintaining cognition in aging individuals.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Ryssa Moffat, Deniz Baskent, Robert Luke, David McAlpine, Lindsey Van Yper
Summary: We used fNIRS and behavioral assessments to investigate the cortical representation of emotional prosody in normal-hearing listeners. Our findings suggest that listeners rely predominantly on F0 cues when recognizing emotion cues, and their performance is poorer when only intensity and speech-rate cues are available. We found that right superior temporal gyrus (STG) is most sensitive to emotional prosody, but there are no emotion-specific cortical activations detected. This study provides insights into potential objective measures of behavioral sensitivity to vocal emotions and their implications for neurodiverse populations and hearing-impaired listeners.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Acoustics
Robert P. Morse, Stephen D. Holmes, Richard Irving, David McAlpine
Summary: Theoretical studies have shown that adding controlled noise can increase the amount of information transmitted by a cochlear implant (CI). This study aims to demonstrate whether stochastic facilitation can enhance CI users' ability to categorize speech sounds. Analog vowels were presented to CI users through a single electrode with independent noise on multiple electrodes. The addition of noise improved vowel categorization, particularly in terms of the information conveyed by the first and second formant. However, noise did not significantly improve vowel recognition; the miscategorizations were just more consistent, indicating the potential for improvement with experience.
JASA EXPRESS LETTERS
(2022)