GOAL

We study neural circuits that support flexible behavior. As we’ve all experienced, sounds encountered in daily life are rarely neutral: you may not notice the sound of a honking horn while stuck in traffic but one heard while crossing the street might startle you. How do we learn to interpret what we hear and act on it? Specifically, we investigate how the brain constructs flexible neuronal representations during adaptive behaviors, how these behaviors are gated during learning, and how the population dynamics underlying these behaviors is disrupted in hearing disorders. We study rodents to leverage advanced genetic tools for probing neural circuits and their ability to quickly learn complex behavioral paradigms. By incorporating a wide range of techniques – behavioral paradigms, neural recordings, computational modeling, circuit mapping, and optogenetics -we seek to identify neural coding principles underlying perceptual flexibility in large-scale auditory networks.