Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Biopsychology Colloquium

12:00 PM

Tuesday, February 22, 2022
12:00-1:00 PM
4448 East Hall

The talk will also be livestreamed via the Zoom link! Passcode: Biopsych

Mekhala Kumar, Biopsychology Graduate Student is giving a talk titled: "Processing of self-generated sounds in the auditory - perirhinal cortical circuit

The ability to rapidly and efficiently process sensory stimuli, and in particular sounds, during locomotion is critical for survival and adaptive behaviour. Some incoming sounds during locomotion originate from external sources (such as the sound of a passing car) while others are self-generated (such as the sound of our own footsteps). While self-generated sounds are predictable and uninformative in some cases, in other situations they carry rich behaviourally-relevant information, such as the substrate we are walking on, our locomotion speed, and our location. Indeed, human studies show that self-generated locomotion sounds can influence behaviour in an ongoing manner. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the encoding, usage, and memory of self-generated sounds are poorly understood. To address this gap, I have designed a novel experimental setup to simultaneously record self-generated sounds and neural activity in freely-moving rats that learn to traverse a track with varying sounds. By recording neural activity in two monosynaptically connected key brain regions for context- and memory-dependent sound processing, the auditory cortex and the perirhinal cortex, I aim to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie encoding and remembering behaviourally-relevant self-generated sounds.