WHO:	Israel Nelken , Dept. of Neurobiology and the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University
TOPIC:	Transformations of stimulus representations in the ascending auditory system
ABSTRACT:	The auditory system has the most extensive subcortical component of all sensory systems. Responses of neurons in auditory cortex as almost, but not quite, as informative as those of neurons in subcortical stations. This finding, reproduced across a large number of studies, raises the question of why do animals need auditory cortex. I would like to argue that feature extraction in the auditory system is really over before sounds reach the cortex. Neurons in auditory cortex enhance the representation of weak and rare acoustic components, thus probably subserving the goal of building a representation of the auditory scene in terms of auditory objects. I will demonstrate this transformation using three sets of complex sounds, whose responses were studied both in cortex and in subcortical stations.
WHEN:	12/15/2003 4:00:00 PM
WHERE:	Med Center 1-7619

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