The auditory CNS is influenced profoundly by sounds heard during development. Auditory
deprivation and augmented sound exposure can each perturb the maturation of neural …

Songbirds, like humans, are highly accomplished vocal learners. The many parallels
between speech and birdsong and conserved features of mammalian and avian auditory …

Vocal communicators discriminate conspecific vocalizations from other sounds and
recognize the vocalizations of individuals. To identify neural mechanisms for the …

Identifying behaviorally relevant sounds in the presence of background noise is one of the
most important and poorly understood challenges faced by the auditory system. An elegant …

Adaptively optimizing experiments has the potential to significantly reduce the number of
trials needed to build parametric statistical models of neural systems. However, application …

Physiological studies in vocal animals such as songbirds indicate that vocalizations drive
auditory neurons particularly well. But the neural mechanisms whereby vocalizations are …

Behavioral responses to sociosexual signals often depend on gonadal steroid hormones,
which are thought to modulate behavior by acting on motivational systems in the brain …

An important question in sensory neuroscience is what coding strategies and mechanisms
are used by the brain to detect and discriminate among behaviorally relevant stimuli. There …

The majority of sensory physiology experiments have used anesthesia to facilitate the
recording of neural activity. Current techniques allow researchers to study sensory function …

The efficient-coding hypothesis asserts that neural and perceptual sensitivity evolved to
faithfully represent biologically relevant sensory signals. Here we characterized the …