Simon Co-authors Neural Computation Cover Story

Prof. Jonathan Simon (ECE/ISR/Biology) along with fellow Maryland researchers Murat Aytekin, a postdoc in the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), and Prof. Cynthia Moss (Psychology/ISR) has co-authored the cover story of the March issue of the journal, Neural Computation, published by MIT Press. The title of the article is "A Sensorimotor Approach to Sound Localization."

Sound localization is known to be a complex phenomenon, combining multisensory information processing, experience-dependent plasticity, and movement. Aytekin, Moss and Simon present a sensorimotor model that addresses the question of how an organism could learn to localize sound sources without any a priori neural representation of its head-related transfer function or prior experience with auditory spatial information. They demonstrate quantitatively that the experience of the sensory consequences of its voluntary motor actions allows an organism to learn the spatial location of any sound source. Using examples from humans and echolocating bats, their model shows that a naive organism can learn the auditory space based solely on acoustic inputs and their relation to motor states.

Users can read the article at the Neural Computation website.

Published March 21, 2008