Cosyne 2005 Workshops
March 21-22, 2005
Snowbird, Utah
Workshop Title
Quantitative Approaches to Central Auditory Processing
Organizer(s)
Xiaoqin Wang: [mailto:]
Abstract
This workshop will bring together 9 leading researchers working with highly quantitative tools to discuss important issues concerning studies of central auditory systems. Quantitative approaches have long been the hallmark of auditory neurophysiology. Historically, highly quantitative methods for neurophysiological studies (such as the reverse-correlation method) were often first developed in the auditory system (because of its complexity) and later transferred to other sensory systems. The challenges that auditory researchers face include a particularly long subcortical pathway (as compared with other sensory systems) and highly non-linear processing at multiple stages leading to the auditory cortex. This workshop will focus on a fundamental question concerning everyone in this field: How to systematically and quantitatively characterize the functionality of a central auditory neuron? Traditionally, this problem has been approached by estimating receptive field (RF) of a neuron using techniques based on reverse-correlation or spike-triggered averaging, which has intrinsic limitations when applied to time-varying non-linear systems as one often finds in the central auditory system of mammals. More recently, information theoretic analysis methods have emerged to be an alternative venue to approach these problems from a different angle. Invited speakers will be asked to give thought-provoking talks (not their typical story-telling talks) that will critically examine issues centered on this fundamental question. For example, to what extent can linear approximations capture the essential functionalities of auditory neurons? What are alternative characterization methods? How are such methods applied across species and sub-modalities? These issues are of great interest not only to auditory neurophysiologists but also to those working on other sensory systems as well.
The organizer believes that this workshop fits well with the overall goals of the CoSyNe meeting and should be attractive to a wide range of participants at this meeting, including both experimentalists and computational researchers. The invited speakers represent a range of diverse (and often opposite) opinions and approaches towards the above questions and issues. Each of these speakers, with its own laboratory, works on a different model system (rats, ferrets, cats and primates) and focuses on different sub-modalities and structures within the central auditory system (from cochlear nucleus to inferior colliculus to thalamus to auditory cortex). All speakers are highly active contributors to the literature in this area of research and are well regarded by their peers. Except one, none of the invitees has spoken at previous CoSyNe workshops.
