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Sensory systems are known to adapt their coding strategies to the statistics of their environment, but little is still known about the perceptual implications of such adjustments. We investigated how auditory spatial processing adapts to stimulus statistics by presenting human listeners and anesthetized ferrets with noise sequences in which interaural level differences (ILD) rapidly fluctuated according to a Gaussian distribution. The mean of the distribution biased the perceived laterality of a subsequent stimulus, whereas the distribution's variance changed the listeners' spatial sensitivity. The responses of neurons in the inferior colliculus changed in line with these perceptual phenomena. Their ILD preference adjusted to match the stimulus distribution mean, resulting in large shifts in rate-ILD functions, while their gain adapted to the stimulus variance, producing pronounced changes in neural sensitivity. Our findings suggest that processing of auditory space is geared toward emphasizing relative spatial differences rather than the accurate representation of absolute position.

Original publication

DOI

10.1016/j.neuron.2010.05.018

Type

Journal article

Journal

Neuron

Publication Date

24/06/2010

Volume

66

Pages

937 - 948

Keywords

Acoustic Stimulation, Action Potentials, Adaptation, Physiological, Analysis of Variance, Animals, Auditory Cortex, Auditory Perception, Female, Ferrets, Humans, Linear Models, Male, Models, Neurological, Neurons, Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychometrics, Psychophysics, Reaction Time, Space Perception, Time Factors