The pentagonal faces of a soccer ball or the smooth surface of an egg reflect light patterns that are readily perceived as three-dimensional shapes. Yet, each object projects different 3D signals. The regular pattern of projected pentagons from the ball form on the retina a compelling texture gradient. The unmarked surface of the egg, however, only a shading gradient. Traditionally, the presence or absence of image signals reflected by various objects in a scene has been modelled in terms of signal reliability.

We are activating the deafened auditory pathway with a penetrating auditory nerve electrode array. Our original motivation was to improve restoration of hearing for deaf people. Indeed, our short-term animal experiments show that this ‘intraneural’ stimulation is superior to results with a conventional cochlear implant by every measure that we have tested in anesthetized cats. We also made an unexpected observation that has both clinical and basic science relevance.

Performance on many perceptual tasks improves with practice, indicating that our sensory systems are not rigid but rather can be changed through experience. My coworkers and I have been investigating the factors that induce and those that prevent perceptual learning on auditory skills, including how those factors change with age and are affected by sensory and cognitive disorders. Conclusions drawn from learning on fine-grained auditory discrimination tasks have held for visual and speech learning, suggesting that common principles are at play across multiple domains.

A general theory of development holds that a heightened period of neural plasticity underlies both a greater capacity for learning and a greater vulnerability to sensory deprivation, such as hearing loss. To explore the neural mechanisms associated with developmental skill learning, we recorded telemetrically from auditory cortex neurons as freely moving adult and adolescent gerbils attended to, and trained on, an auditory task.

The question of why we hear a beat in music, particularly because we as humans are seemingly unique in this ability, has intrigued researchers for decades. In this talk, I will argue that studying our ability to tap to musical beat can reveal much about the neural underpinnings of auditory scene analysis, pattern detection, temporal prediction, and sensorimotor integration.

Pour rencontrer Ingrid Johnsrude, merci de contacter Daniel Pressnitzer : daniel.pressnitzer@gmail.com.

Pour rencontrer Coren Apicella, merci de contacter Nicolas Baumard : nbaumard@gmail.com.

Pour rencontrer Catherine Hobaiter, merci de contacter Philippe Schlenker : philippe.schlenker@gmail.com

Pour rencontrer Stephen Fleming, merci de contacter Catherine Tallon-Baudry: catherine.tallon-baudry@ens.fr.