Event

MATHBIOL Seminar: The progression of neural representations of speech in the brain, from...

Tuesday, May 2, 2023
12:30 p.m.
3206 Kirwan Hall
https://www-math.umd.edu/research/seminars/math-biology.html#

Title: "The progression of neural representations of speech in the brain, from acoustics to semantics"

Speaker: Jonathan Simon (University of Maryland)

Abstract: Listening to speech drives robust neural responses throughout auditory and language processing pathways. These can be recorded non-invasively using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG), since the neural processing is performed using electrical current that generate recordable electromagnetic fields. The recorded fields can be well modeled as the linear superposition of responses of the different brain areas, each of which responds approximately linearly to the speech representation to which it is tuned. This talk will focus on the concomitant multi-dimensional kernel estimation, and the identification of the relevant speech representations. The earliest (lowest latency) neural representations are dominantly acoustical (“bottom up”), but later neural representations become more and more influenced by language and general cognitive (“top down”) factors, and tend to reflect the speech as it is perceived rather than as the acoustic input alone would predict.