Michael Pecka: Sound decisions: Active audition during unrestricted behaviour
| When |
Jan 15, 2025
from 12:15 PM to 01:00 PM |
|---|---|
| Where | Bernstein Center, Hansastr. 9a, Lecture Hall. |
| Contact Name | Gundel Jaeger |
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Abstract
How do we hear out individual talkers from a crowd? Understanding how specific natural behaviors arise from neural processing is a primary goal of neuroscience and ethology. Voluntary self-motion to gather information about the resulting changes in sensory inputs (and potential mismatches with internal predictions) represents a fundamental element of such natural behaviors, since the interdependence of self-motion and the resulting modulation of sensory information is a central motive of “active sensing”. Likewise, active perception of a particular sensory source critically depends on its behavioral relevance, e.g., whether the receiver is interested in the information emitted by a specific source.
To reflect these critical components of ethological sensing and decision-making in a lab environment, we developed a behavioral paradigm to study active audition, i.e., selective auditory processing and decision-making during self-motion. Animals explore an open-field arena to find a sensory target, which triggers the presentation of a rewarded “target stimulus”. Using a sound-localization version of this paradigm combined with chronic multi-electrode recordings in freely navigating gerbils, we revealed previously unknown spatial coding in primary auditory cortex (A1) during active audition: the task-specific identity of the sound-source altered the spatial preference of A1 neurons (Amaro et al., 2021). Such flexible coding could be crucial for audition in complex environments, such as on a cocktail party, specifically the continuous tracking of a sound source while moving.
Recently, we further established unsupervised quantifications of behavioral syllables and phrases in gerbils using machine-learning software with the goal of objectively defining the behaviorally relevant (hidden) states of the animals. Ultimately, we aim to establish the causal relationship between neuronal activity and specific behavioral states during active audition and decision-making.