Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 2: Neurophysics I
BP 2.10: Talk
Monday, March 16, 2015, 12:00–12:15, H 1058
Discrimination, correlation and prediction of collective neural responses to natural sounds in the auditory midbrain — •Dominika Lyzwa1,2 and Michael Herrmann2 — 1Dept. Nonlinear Dynamics, MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany — 2Institute for Perception, Action and Behavior, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, U.K.
The main structure in the auditory midbrain, the inferior colliculus (IC) is the central converging station for all sound information and important for processing complex sounds, such as speech. How complex sounds are encoded by groups of neurons across the IC is an open question. In order to better understand the processing of this nucleus, we investigated the separability of multi-unit responses. To explore the spatial extent of the neural representation, we computed noise correlations between neural groups across the IC. The analysis is based on spiking multi-unit activity which had been simultaneously recorded from 32 positions along and across isofrequency laminae of the ICC while presenting 11 species-specific vocalizations to guinea pigs. Using neural discrimination and cross-correlation it was found that small groups of neurons reliably encode the spectrotemporally rich set of vocalizations. Combination of a few multi-units yielded improved discrimination over an individual unit, but temporal correlations between the units did not improve discrimination. The findings suggest that encoding of vocalizations in the mammalian inferior colliculus is shaped by the input and organization of receptive fields and not by neural interactions within this nucleus.