Student-run speaker series: Jennifer Bizley

On Tuesday September 12th at 17:30, the student-run speaker series "Circuits club" will feature a lecture by Jennifer Bizley, UCL Ear Institute, UK. 

Her presentation, entitled "Mapping sounds into space" will be held at the BCCN Lecture Hall, Philippstraße 13, Haus 6.

Abstract: The spatial location of a sound source must be reconstructed from sound localization cues, principally available through the comparison of the timing and level of the sound at the two ears. These cues are extracted by dedicated brainstem nuclei, but, at least in primates and carnoviores, auditory cortex is required for sound localisation. In this talk I will present some of our recent data looking at how auditory cortex contributes to our ability to map sounds into space. Historically, spatial receptive fields are assumed to be anchored to the direction of the head - that is to provide a head-centered representation. However,  because all previous recordings have been made in animals whose heads are fixed or maintained at the center of a speaking ring this assumption has remained untested. We recorded spatial receptive fields in ferrets foraging freely in a sound field and observed that while many neurons did encode auditory space in a head centered reference frame, a smaller subpopulation encoded the location of the source in the world. Subsequently, by training animals in two distinct tasks we were also able to demonstrate that ferrets can report sound source location across both head and world centered reference frames. I will also present some unpublished data looking at how auditory cortex and parietal cortex encode sensory and motor signals during an audiovisual localisation task.

Here you can find information about the next appointments!