This project is no longer available.

PhD in Neuroscience

with Prof Alan Palmer and Dr Trevor Shackleton
alan@ihr.mrc.ac.uk, trevor@ihr.mrc.ac.uk

Sound localisation plays a crucial role in our ability to orient to unexpected events and to communicate through speech in noisy environments. The inability to follow changes in the location of sounds correlates with self-reported hearing handicap. The subject of this PhD will be to study in an animal model whether this represents a failure to track changes in essentially static cues or whether it is a failure of emergent dynamic cue processing.

A good deal is known about both the static and dynamic binaural properties of neurones in the lower nuclei in the brain (reviewed: Palmer & Kuwada, 2005), however very little is known about responses in the cortex. For example, it is known that neurones in the inferior colliculus can represent changes in binaural cues at rates up to several hundred hertz (Joris et al. 2006), however psychologically rates as low as tens of hertz cannot be tracked (Grantham, 1986). One possible reason for this would be a decrease in the ability to represent dynamic changes within the cortex. In this project you will extend our knowledge of the processing of both static and dynamic binaural cues within the auditory cortex by recording the responses of individual and groups of neurones to specially designed auditory stimuli.

This project is aimed at mathematically adept graduates with a first- or upper second-class degree from life sciences (such as biology or neuroscience) or mathematical subjects (including physics and computer science). You will be taught state-of-the-art laboratory methods for recording from neurons in the brain of animals and use computational techniques for data analysis.

Gatehouse S, and Akeroyd M. Two-eared listening in dynamic situations. International Journal of Audiology 45: 120 - 124, 2006.

Grantham DW. Detection and discrimination of simulated motion of auditory targets in the horizontal plane. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 79: 1939-1949, 1986.

Joris PX, et al. (2006). Auditory Midbrain and Nerve Responses to Sinusoidal Variations in Interaural Correlation. The Journal of Neuroscience 26, 279-289

Palmer AR and Kuwada S. (2005). Binaural and spatial coding in the inferior colliculus. In The Inferior Colliculus, ed. Winer JA & Schreiner CE, pp. 377-410. Springer, New York.