LSLT: Neha Joshi (ECE)

Neural Mechanisms underlying Segregation in the Ferret Cocktail Party

Abstract: In a noisy environment with multiple speakers, the auditory system needs to deconstruct the speech to be able to segregate the sound mixture and process the streams of interest selectively. This effect of attending to a single source from a mixture is called the cocktail party effect. We use the ferret as an animal model to study how the auditory and frontal cortex resolves this problem. In the first part of this work, we design a simulated cocktail party problem and train ferrets to attend to a single speaker in a two-speaker mixture. We demonstrate that the ferret can successfully perform this task. For the second part of this work, we record neurophysiological data from the ferret brain to understand the mechanisms underlying selective processing in the ferret.