Human beings effortlessly perform complex feats of auditory learning and discrimination; for example, identifying new friends on the telephone just from the way they say ``hello'', predicting a family member's arrival home by the sound of the car alone, or recognizing music from mere snippets heard while flipping through channels on the radio. These everyday yet remarkable abilities are thought to depend on the neocortex, but the characteristics that give this six-layered neural tissue its incredible flexibility and computational power are still poorly understood. Research in my laboratory addresses fundamental questions about the cortical mechanisms of auditory perception and learning, including:

• How is auditory information transformed within cortical circuits?
• What roles do different cortical cell types play in auditory perception and learning?
• How is cortical processing of auditory information affected by acoustic experience during development and auditory learning in adulthood?
• How is cortical processing altered in psychiatric disorders affecting auditory perception and learning?

Research in the laboratory is highly interdisciplinary, involving a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, and computational techniques. Our work benefits from our affiliations with the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology and UCL's brand-new Ear Institute; we also have collaborative links with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and many other academic research units in the UK and abroad. We welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with a good background in experimental or computational neuroscience, a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research, and a keen interest in understanding the cortical mechanisms of auditory perception and learning.

Representative Publications:

Linden JF, Orduña I, Sahani M, Mercado E III, Gluck MA, and Merzenich MM. Experience-dependent emergence of complex feature detectors in adult cortex. Submitted.

Linden JF, Liu RC, Sahani M, Schreiner CE, and Merzenich MM (2003). Spectrotemporal structure of receptive fields in areas AI and AAF of mouse auditory cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 90: 2660-2675. PDF

Linden JF and Schreiner CE (2003). Columnar transformations in auditory cortex? A comparison to visual and somatosensory cortices. Cerebral Cortex 13: 83-89. PDF

Sahani M and Linden JF (2003a). How linear are auditory cortical responses? In Becker S, Thrun S, and Obermayer K (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, pp. 109-116. PDF

Sahani M and Linden JF (2003b). Evidence optimization techniques for estimating stimulus-response functions. In Becker S, Thrun S, and Obermayer K (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15, pp. 301-308. PDF

Collaborators and Colleagues:
Dr. Maneesh Sahani, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL
Professor John O'Keefe, Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, UCL
Dr. David McAlpine, Department of Physiology and Ear Institute, UCL
Assistant Professor Robert Liu, Emory University (USA)
Assistant Professor Eduardo Mercado III, University of Buffalo, SUNY (USA)
Professor Michael M. Merzenich, University of California, San Francisco (USA)
Professor Christoph E. Schreiner, University of California, San Francisco (USA)