2017-2018 Faculty Research Grants
Jay Johnson (Engineering & Computer Science)
Neural Basis for Auditory Scene Analysis
New developments in the field of engineering have made it feasible to acquire large sets of acoustic, movement, and neurophysiology data during natural communication of marmosets. Ultimately, it is of interest to understand how these data sets interrelate and how natural communication acoustics are represented in the auditory cortex. The proposed collaborations will involve development and application of information-dynamical methods to understand the relationships between animal vocalizations, behavior, and cortical responses in the auditory cortex. This work will utilize information-dynamical tools that have been developed and applied in geospace data sets such as transfer entropy and convergent cross-mapping, which have been used to identify causality in storm and substorm dyanmics. The goal is to apply these tools to acoustic, movement, and neural data sets of behaving animals to uncover causal relationships between these data sets.