Graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to join the speaker for lunch after the seminar. To sign up for a spot, please email: jmarcus@upenn.edu 

Michele Insanally
Department of Otolaryngology
University of Pittsburgh

Contributions of diverse cortical neuron responses to auditory perceptual learning

Flexible responses to sensory cues in dynamic environments are essential for adaptive auditory-guided behaviors such as navigation and communication. How do neural circuits flexibly gate sensory information to select appropriate behavioral strategies based on sensory input and context? Auditory neural responses during behavior are diverse, ranging from highly-reliable ‘classical’ responses (i.e. robust, frequency-tuned cells) to irregular or seemingly random ‘non-classically responsive’ firing patterns (i.e., nominally non-responsive cells) that fail to demonstrate any significant trial-averaged responses to sensory inputs or other behavioral factors. While classically responsive cells have been extensively studied for decades, the contribution of non-classically responsive cells to behavior has remained underexplored despite their prevalence. Using a single-trial, spike-timing-dependent Bayesian decoder we’ve shown that non-classically responsive cells in auditory cortex and secondary motor cortex contain significant stimulus and choice information and encode flexible task rules. Moreover, in a spiking recurrent neural network model both classically and non-classically responsive units are essential for asymptotic task performance, however their role during learning is unknown. In this seminar, I will discuss our recent work investigating how diverse cortical responses emerge and evolve during flexible behavior; how top-down frontal inputs modulate population responses in sensory cortex during learning; and the unique role of non-classically responsive neurons for enabling behavioral flexibility.

A pizza lunch will be served.