Title: How does the brain map sounds into the world? 

Speaker: Jennifer Bizley (UCL Ear Institute, UCL)

Location: In Person & Online via Zoom

Abstract: The spatial location of a sound source must be reconstructed from sound localization cues, principally available through the comparison of the incoming sound at the two ears. Consequently, spatial receptive fields have until recently been assumed to be anchored to the direction of the head. By recording spatial receptive fields in ferrets foraging freely in a sound field we were able to observe that while most neurons did encode auditory space in a head centered reference frame, a smaller subpopulation encoded the location of the source in the world. In this talk I will present unpublished work exploring how spatial reference frames are constructed in the auditory cortex, and how we hope that measuring head movements in 3D will allow us to understand what role active sensation plays in sound guided navigation.

BlueSky: bizleylab.bsky.social