Le lundi 17 décembre 2007, de 11h à 12h30.
Attention! Le séminaire aura lieu à l'UFR Biomédicale des Saints Pères, 45 rue des Sts Pères, 75006 Paris, Salle de réunion du LPP, H432, 4e étage. [plan]
Jan Schnupp, chercheur au Dept de Physiologie, Anatomie et Génétique de l'Université d'Oxford, et Oxford Auditory Neuroscience Research Group UK.
Neural Representations of Vocalisations in Auditory Cortex
It is well known that the ear is sensitive to sound waves, but nevertheless we would not describe the process of hearing as one of "perceiving waves". When we listen to a characteristic sound, like an animal vocalization or a spoken word, the nervous system initially simply encodes physical properties of the sound, i.e. its spectro-temporal energy distribution, and we assume that this initial representation is "recoded" or "interpreted" at higher stations of the auditory system to enable the recognition of classes of sounds which appears integral to our perception. In my talk, I shall ask whether this "recoding" has already happened at the level of the primary auditory cortex. And how should we "decode" spike trains recorded at this, or other levels of the central auditory pathway ?