Bruno Giordano: The perceptual and cerebral processing of natural sounds
When: Wednesday, January 28th, 2015 @ 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Where: Room 4.31/4.33, Informatics Forum, Crichton Street, University of Edinburgh
Seminar Title
The perceptual and cerebral processing of natural sounds
Seminar Speaker(s)
Dr. Bruno Giordano (Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK)
Seminar Abstract
The most important task perceptual systems absolve to is to recover what objects in the environment gave rise to the sensory stimulus. The auditory system is no exception to this: everyday we recognize not only speakers or musical instruments, but also cars approaching, leaves rustling, and glasses clinking. In this talk, I will outline the research I carried out to understand what properties of the sound source are perceived and represented by cortical processes, and the role of acoustical structure in this process.
I will briefly describe a series of studies on: [1] the perception of sound-object materials; [2] on the modeling of acoustical structure for timbre perception; [3] on the role of acoustic and semantic information for the perceptual dissimilarity of environmental sounds. I will finally describe in more detail a series of neuroimaging studies that aimed to understand: [1] the cortical anatomy for the processing of the identity of sound sources; [2] the encoding of time-varying acoustical structure in brain oscillations; [3] the representation of sound-category information in spatial fMRI patterns.
Speaker Bio