Animal Studies [click left for another topic]
While human behavioral studies teach us how stimuli are perceived, they cannot tell us directly how information is encoded in the neural system. By undertaking tightly coupled human psychophysical studies and animal physiology studies, we can begin to test how information is encoded and processed in different neural structures. Animal psychophysical studies, run in parallel with human behavioral studies and animal physiological studies, help ensure that neural results can be used to interpret human studies and break ground for future physiological studies in awake, behaving animals.
Dent, ML, TE Welch, EM McClaine, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2008). “Species differences in the categorization of acoustic stimuli by birds,” Behavioral Processes, 77, 184-190.
Narayan, R, V Best, EJ Ozmeral, E McClaine, M Dent, BG Shinn-Cunningham, and K Sen (2007). “Cortical interference effects in the cocktail party problem,” Nature Neuroscience, 10(12), 1601-1607 (with supplementary material).
Shinn-Cunningham, BG, V Best, ML Dent, FJ Gallun, E McClaine, R Narayan, E Ozmeral, and K Sen (2007). “Behavioral and neural identification of birdsong under several masking conditions,” in Hearing-From Sensory Processing to Perception, B Kollmeier, G Klump, V Hohmann, U Langemann, M Mauermann, S Uppenkamp, and J Verhey (eds), Springer-Verlag, 207-214.
Lane, CC, N Kopco, B Delgutte, BG Shinn-Cunningham, and HS Colburn (2004). “A cat's cocktail party: Psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational studies of spatial release from masking,” in Auditory Signal Processing: Physiology, Psychoacoustics, and Models, D Pressnitzer, A de Cheveigne, S McAdams, and L Collet (eds.), Springer Verlag, 405-413.