Gregg Recanzone, Ph.D.

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Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior

  • Core Faculty, Center for Neuroscience

Auditory Perception

Research Summary

Our research involves investigating the role of the cerebral cortex in the perception of auditory signals and how natural aging affects both the cortical activity and the perception.  Age-related hearing deficits affect over half of all individuals in their 70s, leading to difficulty in understanding speech which in turn leads to social isolation.  While lesion studies have shown that the activity of the cerebral cortex is essential in the perception of auditory signals, from simple tones to complex speech patterns, we understand very little of how the activity at the single neuron level relates to these perceptions.  Our goal is to better understand this complex processing and to determine what aspects of this processing are specifically affected by natural aging.  The ultimate goal is to use this knowledge to design better hearing - assist devices and remedial therapies to either reverse the deficits induced by natural aging or to prevent them.

Select Publications

Recanzone, GH (2012) Neural correlates of acoustic space perception.  Springer Handbook of Auditory Research (in press).

Recanzone, GH (2011) Perception of auditory signals.  Ann N Y Acad Sci 1224:96-108.

Juarez-Salinas, DL, Engle, JR, Navarro, XO and Recanzone, GH (2010) Normal aging results in a degradation of serial processing in the spatial auditory cortical pathway.  J Neurosci 30:14795-14804.

Padberg, JJ, Recanzone, GH, Engle, JR, Cooke, D and Krubitzer, LA (2010) Lesions in posterior parietal area 5 in monkeys result in rapdi behavioral and cortical plasticity.  J Neurosci 30:12918-12935.

Recanzone, GH, Engle, JR and Juarez-Salinas, D (2010) Spatial and non-spatial processing in the primate auditory cortex. Hear. Res.271:115-122.

Recanzone GH and Cohen, YE (2009) What and where processing streams in the primate auditory cortex revisited.  Beh. Brain Res. 206:1-7.

Recanzone, GH (2009) Interactions of auditory and visual stimuli in space and time.  Hear. Res.258:89-99.

Padberg, JJ, Cerkevich, C., Engle, J, Rajan, A, Recanzone, GH, Kaas, J and Krubitzer, L (2009) Thalamocortical connections of parietal somatosensory cortical fields in macaque monkeys are highly divergent and convergent.  Cer. Cortex 19:2038-2064.

Miller, LM and Recanzone, GH (2009) Populations of auditory cortical neurons can accurately encode acoustic space across stimulus intensity.  Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106:5931-5935.

Affiliations

Neuroscience