JNP Micro Podcasts ”Four Questions”: Robust Aggregate Code of Competing Sounds in Auditory Cortex

In this podcast, author Jian Carlo Nocon (Boston University) discusses the recently published research titled "A robust and compact population code for competing sounds in auditory cortex." 

 

NEW & NOTEWORTHY 

Little is known about how populations of neurons within cortical circuits encode sensory stimuli in the presence of competing stimuli at other spatial locations. Here, the authors investigate this problem in auditory cortex using a recently proposed information-theoretic approach. They found a small subset of neurons nearly maximizes information about target sounds in the presence of competing maskers, approaching information levels for isolated stimuli, and provides a noise-robust code for sounds in a complex auditory scene.

 

Article Citation:

A robust and compact population code for competing sounds in auditory cortex

Jian Carlo Nocon, Jake Witter, Howard Gritton, Xue Han, Conor Houghton, and Kamal Sen

Journal of Neurophysiology 2023 130:3, 775-787