Research Insititute John Middlebrooks Ph.D., Laboratory Director Research in the Central Systems Lab examines the brain mechanisms of hearing, particularly issues related to stimulus coding in the auditory cortex.
Current projects involve spatial hearing and cochlear prosthesis.
We study spatial hearing because awareness of the locations of sound-sources in space is a prominent feature of the human sensory experience, because sound localization is performed well by most laboratory animals, and because sound localization requires a significant degree of central integration. Experimental approaches include psychophysical studies with normal human listeners, cortical physiology studies with experimental animals, and computational modeling. In studies of cochlear prosthesis, our goal is to improve the transfer of information from a cochlear prosthesis to the auditory cortex and, thereby, to improve human speech reception. Those experiments utilize an animal model in which we stimulate a cochlear prosthesis and record from ensembles of neurons in the auditory cortex.