Kerry Walker
Dept of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, University of Oxford
Speaker Information
Kerry WalkerDept of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, University of Oxford |
GCNI Symposium "Windows on the Brain" Speaker Information |
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Kerry studied Psychology and Mathematics as an undergraduate (BSc hon., Memorial University), before specializing in Auditory Neuroscience for her graduate studies in Canada (MSc, Dalhousie University) and the UK (DPhil, University of Oxford). She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher for Prof Andrew King for 3 years before starting her independent research lab at the University of Oxford, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Neuroscience. Kerry also works as a Reviewing Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience. The Walker Lab examines the brain processes that allow humans and other animals to recognize and attend to natural sounds. Their work identifies the spiking events in auditory cortical neurons that form representations of complex sound features, such as their tonal quality ("pitch") or speech content. The group uses range of techniques to understand the neural basis of hearing, including Neuropixels recordings, 2-photon calcium imaging, human EEG, and behavioural tasks in humans, mice and ferrets.
In order for animals to thrive in their complex environments, their sensory systems must form representations of objects that are invariant to changes in some dimensions of their physical cues. For example, we can recognize a friend's speech in a forest, a small office, and a cathedral, even though the soundwaves reaching our ears will vary substantially across these 3 environments. I will discuss our recent experiments into the mechanisms through which neurons in auditory cortex can form stable representations of sounds in an acoustically varied world. Our 2-photon calcium imaging studies in ferrets have provided new insights into the complex frequency receptive fields of auditory cortical neurons, and how these are topographically organized. Our electrophysiological work has further revealed how complex auditory objects are represented invariantly across listening environments. These studies provide new insights into how we can recognize complex auditory features or objects, even in highly reverberant environments.