Central Auditory Processing and Neural Modeling

The full power of combining experiment and theory has yet to be unleashed on studies of the neural mechanisms in the brain involved in acoustic information processing. In recent years, enormous amounts of physiological data have been generated in many laboratories around the world, characterizing electrical responses of neurons to a wide array of acoustic stimuli at all levels of the auditory neuroaxis. Modern approaches of cellular and molecular biology are leading to new understandings of synaptic transmission of acoustic information, while application of modern neuro-anatomical methods is giving us a fairly comprehensive view ofthe bewildering complexity of neural circuitry within and between the major nuclei of the central auditory pathways. Although there is still the need to gather more data at all levels of organization, a ma­ jor challenge in auditory neuroscience is to develop new frameworks within which existing and future data can be incorporated and unified, and which will guide future laboratory ex­ perimentation. Here the field can benefit greatly from neural modeling, which in the central auditory system is still in its infancy. Indeed, such an approach is essential if we are to address questions related to perception of complex sounds including human speech, to the many di­ mensions of spatial hearing, and to the mechanisms that underlie complex acoustico-motor behaviors. Front Matter....Pages i-x Processing of Vocalization Signals in Neurons of the Inferior Colliculus and Medial Geniculate Body....Pages 1-11 Coding of FM and AM Sounds at the Auditory Midbrain....Pages 13-22 Inhibition and Inhibitory Plasticity in the Mammalian Auditory Midbrain....Pages 23-30 Neuronal Periodicity Coding and Pitch Effects....Pages 31-41 Specializations of the Auditory System for the Analysis of Natural Sounds....Pages 43-53 The Processing of Species-Specific Complex Sounds by the Ascending and Descending Auditory Systems....Pages 55-70 Speech Recognition Using Dynamic Programming of Bayesian Neural Networks....Pages 71-76 A Computational Model of Birdsong Learning by Auditory Experience and Auditory Feedback....Pages 77-88 On Recent Results in Modeling of Sensory Neurons....Pages 89-99 Interneurons Which Shape Response Properties in Dorsal Cochlear Nucleus....Pages 101-115 Behavioral and Physiological Studies of Sound Localization in the Cat....Pages 117-127 The Processing of Auditory Stimuli for Eye Movements in the Posterior Parietal Cortex of Monkeys....Pages 129-138 Location Coding by Auditory Cortical Neurons....Pages 139-148 Spatial Receptive Field Properties of Primary Auditory Cortical Neurons....Pages 149-160 Models of Direction Estimation with Spherical-Function Approximated Cortical Receptive Fields....Pages 161-174 Medical Image Data Compression Using Cubic Convolution Spline Interpolation....Pages 175-188 Independent Component Analysis of Electroencephalographic and Event-Related Potential Data....Pages 189-197 Time Structure of Cortical Activity....Pages 199-210 Organization and Perturbation of NeuronalAssemblies....Pages 211-224 Neural Principles of Visual Cortical Processing: Scene Segmentation Investigated with Microelectrodes and Models....Pages 225-246 Dynamic Mechanisms of Perception Exhibited by Bat Biosonar....Pages 247-260 Poster Abstracts of the Workshop on Central Auditory Processing and Neural Modeling....Pages 261-275 Back Matter....Pages 276-282