(Brosch, Selezneva)

When we hear sounds they often occur in a context of other sensory stimuli or they trigger actions. In this project we are interested in how the auditory context is represented in the auditory cortex of operantly conditioned monkeys.

Figure:
Neuronal activity in the auditory cortex of a trained monkey during the performance of an auditory discrimination task. The task was to detect a falling frequency contour in a sequence of pure tones. The poststimulus time histogram shows that the neurons did not only fire in response to the tones of the sequence (yellow bars) but also at the time the monkey made contact with a touch bar, by which it indicated its readiness to perform the auditory task.

Keypapers

Brosch, M., Selezneva, E., and Scheich, H. (in press) Non-auditory events of a behavioral procedure activate auditory cortex of highly trained monkeys. J. Neurosci.

Brosch, M., Selezneva, E., Bucks, C., and Scheich, H. (2004) Macaque monkeys discriminate pitch relationships. Cognition, 91: 259-272.

Brosch M. and Scheich, H. (2005) Non-acoustic influence on neural activity in auditory cortex. In: Auditory Cortex: towards a synthesis of human and animal research, edited by König, R., Heil, P., Budinger, E., and Scheich, H., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, pp 127-144.