Efficient auditory coding.

The auditory neural code must serve a wide range of auditory tasks that require great sensitivity in time and frequency and be effective over the diverse array of sounds present in natural acoustic environments. It has been suggested that sensory…

Recognition tasks of simple visual patterns have been used to assess an early visual-auditory sensory-substitution system, consisting of the coupling of a rough model of the human retina with an inverse model of the cochlea, by means of a…

The barn owl (Tyto alba) uses interaural time difference (ITD) cues to localize sounds in the horizontal plane. Low-order binaural auditory neurons with sharp frequency tuning act as narrow-band coincidence detectors; such neurons respond equally…

C. T. Best, M. Studdert-Kennedy, S. Manuel, and J. Rubin-Spitz (1989) reported that listeners given speech labels showed categorical-like perception of a series of complex tone analogs to a /la/-/ra/ speech series, whereas nonspeech listeners were…

Sparse coding provides a class of algorithms for finding succinct representations of stimuli; given only unlabeled input data, it discovers basis functions that capture higher-level features in the data. However, finding sparse codes remains a very…

To localize a sound source in space, the auditory system detects minute differences in the arrival time of a sound between the two ears. It has long been assumed that delay lines and coincidence detectors turn these time differences into a labelled…

Spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) have been widely used as linear approximations to the signal transform from sound spectrograms to neural responses along the auditory pathway. Their dependence on statistical attributes of the stimuli, such…

Behavioral, anatomical, and physiological approaches can be integrated in the study of sound localization in barn owls. Space representation in owls provides a useful example for discussion of place and ensemble coding. Selectivity for space is…

Auditory processing and hearing-related pathologies are heavily influenced by steroid hormones in a variety of vertebrate species, including humans. The hormone estradiol has been recently shown to directly modulate the gain of central auditory…

Sequences of nine binary auditory signals (dots and dashes) were presented to 20 subjects in Experiment I. The subjects were instructed to internally organize the signals into two-dimensional arrays. Visual patterns (letters) could be recognized in…