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I will discuss two topics concerning visual and auditory spatial coding: 1. Early cross-talk between vision and hearing, in which eye movement signals trigger eardrum oscillations and create faint saccade-related sounds. 2. A new theory of neural coding, involving multiplexing of signals via fluctuating activity patterns. Such multiplexing could allow representations to encode more than one simultaneous visual or auditory stimulus. These findings emerged from experimentally testing computational models, highlighting the importance of theory in guiding experimental science.
Selected References:
Lovich, S. N., C. D. King, D. L. Murphy, R. Landrum, C. A. Shera and J. M. Groh (2023). “Parametric information about eye movements is sent to the ears.” Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 120(48): p. e2303562120.
Groh, J. M., M. N. Schmehl, V. C. Caruso and S. T. Tokdar (2024). “Signal switching may enhance processing power of the brain.” Trends Cogn Sci 28(7): 600-613.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer M. Groh is Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Neurobiology, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, where she is a member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Her research concerns how the brain represents spatial information and performs computations on those representations. Her discoveries have shed light on how the brain transforms auditory signals to permit communication with visual signals – despite major differences in the neural “language” used by each sense. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. She has authored many scientific publications as well as a well-regarded book for a general audience (Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are, Harvard University Press, 2014) and a related popular Coursera course The Brain and Space.
