- When
- Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 3:30 – 4:30 pm
- Event interval
- Single day event
- Campus location
- Kincaid Hall (KIN)
- Campus room
- 102/108
- Accessibility contact
- chairpsy@uw.edu
- Event types
- Lectures/Seminars
- Event sponsors
- Department of Psychology
- Description
- Making sense of sounds: cortical circuits for auditory processing
When we listen to a pianist play a melody, our auditory system is hard at work identifying the frequency of the notes, detecting regularities in the melody and making predictions about what note will come next. Making sense of sounds requires that our auditory system perform computations on the incoming sound stream. Over the last decade, my laboratory has mapped out neuronal circuits that support fundamental auditory computations. Importantly, we have linked them to the action of specific cell types in the auditory cortex, finding that specific types of inhibitory neurons facilitate different computations. In particular, parvalbumin-positive inhibitory neurons control frequency discrimination acuity, which supports our ability to tell apart different notes. Somatostatin-positive inhibitory neurons control adaptation to repeated tones as well as detection of unexpected tones. And another inhibitory neuronal type, the VIP neurons, facilitate detection of regularities in sound sequences, such as we would encounter in a repeated musical pattern. Combined, our studies find that the auditory cortex contains multiple microcircuits for specialized auditory computation. These microcircuits likely play similar function in other sensory domains and cognitive tasks.
Faculty hosts: Sama Ahmed and Bonnie Lau
These lectures are made possible by a generous endowment by Professor Allen L. Edwards - Map
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