Neural processing of natural sounds

Neural Processing of Natural Sounds

Neural processing of amplitude-modulated sounds.

Amplitude modulation (AM) is a temporal feature of most natural acoustic signals. A long psychophysical tradition has shown that AM is important in a variety of perceptual tasks, over a range of time scales. Technical possibilities in stimulus synthesis have reinvigorated this field and brought the modulation dimension back into focus. We address the question whether specialized neural mechanis...

Processing of Natural Sounds in the Auditory Forebrain of Songbirds

The long-term goal of our research is to understand the neural mechanisms underlying complex sound recognition and the formation of perceptual acoustical memories. Our methods combine neuroethology, classical auditory neuro-physiology and computational neuroscience. More specifically, we are studying the avian homologue of the mammalian auditory cortex in songbirds to understand its role in pro...

Emotional sounds modulate early neural processing of emotional pictures

In our natural environment, emotional information is conveyed by converging visual and auditory information; multimodal integration is of utmost importance. In the laboratory, however, emotion researchers have mostly focused on the examination of unimodal stimuli. Few existing studies on multimodal emotion processing have focused on human communication such as the integration of facial and voca...

Musical training enhances neural processing of binaural sounds.

While hearing in noise is a complex task, even in high levels of noise humans demonstrate remarkable hearing ability. Binaural hearing, which involves the integration and analysis of incoming sounds from both ears, is an important mechanism that promotes hearing in complex listening environments. Analyzing inter-ear differences helps differentiate between sound sources--a key mechanism that fac...