Ear Institute External Seminar: Michael Pecka

Neuronal mechanisms of context-dependent spatial hearing

Michael Pecka: LMU Munich, Germany

Conventionally, it had been assumed that the brain’s representation of the location of sound sources encodes for absolute positions in space. Recent experimental findings from our and other groups instead suggest a relative representation of auditory space. I will present data from psychophysical tests revealing that the perceived location of a stationary sound source can shift substantially depending on the prior acoustic experience. Neurophysiological findings established that these perceptional shifts could be explained by response adaptation of binaural brainstem neurons. I will explain how this context-dependency of spatial processing transformed our ideas about the brain’s coding of auditory space to optimize information about sound source separation rather than absolute location.