UC Berkeley

The early acoustic environment plays a crucial role in how the brain represents sounds and how language phonemes are perceived. Human infants are born with the capacity to distinguish phonemes from virtually all languages, but very quickly change their perceptual ability to match that of their primary language. This has been described as the Perceptual Magnet Effect in humans, where phoneme tokens are perceived to be more similar than they physically are, leading to decreased discrimination ability.

Early development is marked by distinct critical periods, when cortical regions are highly plastic and particularly sensitive to sensory input. These lasting alterations in cortical sensory representation may directly impact the perception of the external world. My thesis is comprised of three different studies, all of which investigate the role of the developmental acoustic environment on cortical representation and the behavioral consequence of altered cortical representation.

Passive exposure to pure-tone pips during the auditory critical period can lead to over-representation of the exposure tone frequency in the primary auditory cortex (A1) of rats. This over-representation is associated with decreased discrimination ability of that frequency, similar to the Perceptual Magnet Effect in humans. Another hallmark of human language is categorical perception. Using a computational model of A1, I show that certain representation patterns (which may be achieved with passive exposure to two distinct pure-tone pips) in A1 can lead to categorical perception in rats. This suggests that cortical representation may be a mechanism that drives categorical perception.

Rodents are socially vocal animals whose con-specific calls are often presented in bouts in the ultrasonic frequency range. These calls are vocalized at ethologically relevant repetition rates. I show that pure-tone pips that are presented at the ethological repetition rate (but not slower or faster rates) during the auditory critical period lead to over-representation of the pure-tone frequency. A certain subclass of ultrasonic vocalizations, the pup isolation calls, occurs during the auditory critical period. I show that there is over representation of ultrasonic vocalization frequencies in the rat A1. This preferential representation is experience-dependent and is associated with higher discrimination ability.