A neural and behavioral study of auditory induction

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24700151
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Intelligent informatics
• Research Institution: Doshisha University
• Principal Investigator: Kobayasi Kohta 同志社大学, 生命医科学部, 准教授 (40512736)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 聴覚情景分析 / 聴覚皮質 / 音声コミュニケーション / スナネズミ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

When a segment of sound is interrupted by a loud noise, humans perceive that the missing sound continues through the noise. The phenomenon is called as auditory induction. As far as I know, only primate has been reported to have the ability in mammals. In this study, Mongolian gerbil, one of the standard model animal in auditory physiology, was used. They are trained with standard Go/No-Go operant conditioning to discriminate continuous tone bursts (the Go stimulus) from tone bursts with a silent gap in the middle (the No-Go stimulus). Noise was added to Go and No-Go stimuli to determine the condition under which induction would occur. Gerbils showed Go responses to No-Go stimuli only when the gap was filled with the noise spectrally matching the tone. The result presents not only the evidence of the auditory induction in a rodent species but also demonstrates that the rodent can serve as a valuable animal model for future studies of perceptual restoration.

Free Research Field

神経行動学