Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, 29, Rue D'Ulm, Paris, France
Spatial cues are known to confer a significant advantage for the extraction of sounds. Thus a sound source that is well-seperated spatially from other sounds can be more easily attended to from interfering sounds. In this project, ferrets will be trained to detect the presence of a target source in a complex scene. When the different constituents are gradually spatially segregated, the performance of the animal can be used to assess the advantages of the spatialization in the detection task. We will then record during behavior the cortical activity in the ferrets' A1, and in both Anterior Ectosylvian Gyrus (AEG) and Posterior Ectosylvian Gyrus (PEG) at the same time using functional ultrasound imaging initially, and multielectrode arrays afterwards. The idea is to look at the balance of evoked activity on a single-trial basis depending on the degree of spatialization in the attended scene. One key question: is AEG activated only when the scene is spatialized? And how are the responses different in the PEG?
Prof. Shihab Shamma
iec-lsp.ens.fr