Plasticity and Signal Representation in the Auditory System

Abstract

(from the preface) The symposium that has provided the basis for this book, "Plasticity of the Central Auditory System and Processing of Complex Acoustic Signals" was held in Prague on July 7-10, 2003. This is the fourth in a series of seminal meetings summarizing the state of development of auditory system neuroscience that has been organized in that great world city. Books that have resulted from these meetings represent important benchmarks for auditory neuroscience over the past 25 years. While the topics of the 2003 symposium overlapped with those of the 1996 meeting, this field is in an era of remarkable progress, particularly in the field of plasticity of the auditory system. New advances in understanding auditory system plasticity, based substantially on a large and growing body of results from animal experiments, were related to innumerable new insights into the physiology and pathology of speech and music perception and production generated by behavioral studies, and from the application of modern brain imaging techniques. We are living in an especially exciting period of research, marked by an almost astounding rate of advance in the development of our understanding of the hearing brain. The extraordinary series of reports published in this book document this rapid, further advance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)