The Laboratory of Auditory Computation & Neurophysiology

Multisensory Mechanisms in Auditory Perception

In everyday activity, our sense of space is guided by coordinated multisensory analyses of sensory information from the surrounding environment. Multisensory information is critical for identifying and attending to a target sound in a noisy environment (e.g., night bars, restaurants). Multisensory information is also crucial for detecting heard but unseen dangers because the spaces encoded by sounds and sights do not always align. The long-term objective of this study is to understand the fundamental strategies of multisensory perception and cortical neural mechanisms that implement these strategies in the brain.

We are interested in several important questions:

  • How does visual information alter auditory spatial perception in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners?
  • What are the behavioral markers of modality-specific sensory bias?
  • How does visual information modulate spatial selectivity of different cell types in auditory cortex?
  • What are circuit level mechanisms for visual modulation in auditory cortex?

Through a combination of neurophysiology, animal behavior, human psychoacoustics, and statistical and computational modeling, we will gain information in both the empirical and theoretical domains to understand the relationship between perception and stimuli from the environment around us.  

Recent Publications: 

  • Pandey, S., Simhadri, S., Zhou, Y. (2020) Rapid head movements in common marmoset monkeys. iScience. 2020 Feb 21; 23(2): 100837.
  • Venskytis EJ, Clayton C, Montagne C, & Zhou Y. (2019) Audiovisual interactions in stereo sound localization for individuals with unilateral hearing loss. Trends in Hearing, 23:1-17.
  • Zhou Y, Balderas L, Venskytis EJ. (2018) Binaural ambiguity amplifies visual bias in sound source localization. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(6):3118-3123. 
  • Montagne C, Zhou Y. (2018) Audiovisual interactions in front and rear space. Frontiers in Psychology, (9) Article 713. 
  • Montagne C, Zhou Y. (2016) Visual capture of a stereo sound: Interactions between cue reliability, sound localization variability, and cross-modal bias. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(1):471–485.