Aytekin, Moss, Simon author Neural Computation cover story

"A Sensorimotor Approach to Sound Localization," by ISR Postdoc Murat Aytekin, Professor Cynthia Moss (Psychology/ISR) and Assistant Professor Jonathan Simon (ECE/Biology) is the cover story of the March issue of the journal, Neural Computation, published by MIT Press.

Sound localization is known to be a complex phenomenon, combining multisensory information processing, experience-dependent plasticity, and movement. Aytekin, Moss and Simon present a sensorimotor model that addresses the question of how an organism could learn to localize sound sources without any a priori neural representation of its head-related transfer function or prior experience with auditory spatial information. They demonstrate quantitatively that the experience of the sensory consequences of its voluntary motor actions allows an organism to learn the spatial location of any sound source. Using examples from humans and echolocating bats, their model shows that a naive organism can learn the auditory space based solely on acoustic inputs and their relation to motor states.

| Read the article at the Neural Computation web site |

Published March 21, 2008