# Sound encoding by neural populations in auditory cortex during behavior

> **NIH NIH R01** · OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $324,722

## Abstract

Project Summary
Throughout life, humans and other animals adapt their hearing to perceive features of sound that are important
for successful behavioral decisions. Normal-hearing humans are able to detect and discriminate important
sounds in crowded noisy scenes and to understand the speech of individuals the first time they meet.
However, patients with peripheral hearing loss or central processing disorders often have problems hearing in
these challenging settings. Even when they can perceive sounds accurately, the additional listening effort
required negatively impacts other cognitive functions. A better understanding of how the healthy auditory
system operates in cognitively challenging contexts will support new treatments for these deficits.
This project will study how the auditory system represents sound information as it operates in challenging
acoustic environments. There are three specific aims. First, high-density microelectrode arrays will be used to
record the simultaneous activity of neural populations in auditory cortex during behaviors that require detecting
sounds masked by noise or learning new sound-reward associations. Recording from multiple neurons will
enable characterizing how information is encoded by the simultaneous activity of neural populations. These
experiments will test the hypothesis that population activity in auditory cortex generates representations that
are invariant to irrelevant distracting sounds. Second, optogenetic tools will be used to identify distinct neuronal
cell types (excitatory versus inhibitory) in cortex. This study will test the hypothesis that tonic activation of
inhibitory neurons can explain changes in population activity during behavior. Third, machine learning tools will
be used to model the simultaneously recorded neural activity. These experiments will test the hypothesis that
neurons in the same local anatomical circuit in auditory cortex encode information about a relatively small
domain in the space of all possible auditory stimuli. Models fit to experimental data will also describe how
changes in behavioral state shift the way neurons encode sounds and describe sources of correlated
population activity that impact neural discriminability during behavior. Together these experiments will establish
new links between neural representation of sound and the cognitive processes that extract important
information from sound for successful behavior.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10428663
- **Project number:** 5R01DC014950-07
- **Recipient organization:** OREGON HEALTH & SCIENCE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Stephen V David
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $324,722
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-02-01 → 2026-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10428663

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10428663, Sound encoding by neural populations in auditory cortex during behavior (5R01DC014950-07). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10428663. Licensed CC0.

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