Testing the role of predictability in stimulus specific adaptation to frequency-modulated sounds at the auditory subcortical pathway

Date

Jan 24, 2019

Time

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Speaker

Alejandro Tabas

Affiliation

TU Dresden

Series

TUD NIC Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Psychologie

Other Topics

Medizin, Psychologie

Description

Stimulus specific adaptation (SSA) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the auditory pathway, whereby neurons adapt to frequently occurring stimuli but retain sensibility to novel sounds. Two competing neural mechanisms have been previously suggested to be responsible for SSA: habituation, assuming that different neural groups respond and adapt selectively to different stimuli; and predictive coding, that describes neural activity as prediction error and relates adaptation to predictability. In a previous study, we demonstrated that predictability modulates SSA to pure tones in the medial geniculate body (auditory thalamus) and the inferior colliculus (auditory midbrain), in agreement with the predictive coding hypothesis. In this study, we will apply the previous paradigm to dynamic frequency-modulated (FM) sounds. Despite their relevance to human and animal communication, stimulus-specific adaptation to this kind of sounds has not been studied before in mammals. Our aim is 1) to study if subcortical activity elicited by FM sounds shows adaptation to stimulus repetition; if so, 2) to elucidate is such adaptation is stimulus-specific; and, if so, 3) to determine if stimulus-specificity is also sensitive to predictability.

Links

• Livestream

Last modified: Jan 16, 2019, 12:00:26 PM