Human beings effortlessly perform complex feats of sound perception and auditory learning; for example, identifying new friends on the telephone just from the way they say hello, predicting a family member's arrival home by the sound of the car alone, or recognizing music from mere snippets heard while flipping through channels on the radio. These everyday yet remarkable abilities are thought to depend on the neocortex, but the characteristics that give this six-layered neural tissue its incredible flexibility and computational power are still poorly understood. Research in my laboratory addresses fundamental questions about cortical and thalamic mechanisms of sound perception and auditory learning, including:


* How is auditory information transformed within thalamocortical circuits?


* What roles do the components of thalamocortical circuits play in sound perception and auditory learning?


* How is thalamocortical processing of auditory information affected by acoustic experience during development and auditory learning in adulthood?


* How is thalamocortical processing altered in psychiatric disorders affecting auditory perception and learning?


Research in the laboratory is highly interdisciplinary, involving a combination of electrophysiological, behavioural, and computational techniques. Our work benefits from our affiliations with the UCL Ear Institute and the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology; we also have collaborative links with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, the Institute of Ophthalmology, and other academic research units at UCL.