dc.description.abstract |
Linguistic research has revealed that humans and animals can learn to discriminate sounds through both active training and passive exposure, but the changes in neural coding that occur as a result of these two types of training have still not been characterized. To investigate these neural changes in an animal model such as mice, however, it is first necessary to create protocols that can teach mice to discriminate between features of speech sounds. We were able to create successful training protocols for discriminating frequencies in a head-fixed setup and amplitude modulated (AM) sounds in a freely-moving setup. In our preliminary attempts, however, we found little success in training mice to discriminate between AM sounds in head-fixed setup. However, we have identified potential strategies that may improve the process. Through our findings, we have helped to solidify the active behavioral training methods for a two-alternative choice discrimination task, which can then be used for our explorations of active vs. passive training regimens and subsequent physiological investigations of the neural encoding of these sounds. |
en_US |