Emily Allen
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Where exactly does the human brain first process sound? Surprisingly, scientists still do not agree on how to draw the boundaries of primary auditory cortex (A1), the brain's earliest cortical hearing region.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
auditory cortex
Heschl's gyrus
tonotopy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Acquire ultra-high-resolution (~0.35 mm³) 7T MRI anatomical scans of human auditory cortex. Use them to create data-driven maps that match the cortex's underlying cell-layer architecture, rather than relying on the variable Heschl's gyrus landmarks.
- Define primary auditory region A1 in the same individuals using task-based functional MRI to build tuning maps for key acoustic features, including frequency maps (tonotopy).
- Use resting-state connectivity between subcortical and cortical regions to guide where A1's borders are drawn. Combine this with the anatomical data and computational modeling to create a public multimodal atlas.
More about the research
Common methods estimate A1 from Heschl's gyri, folds of the brain surface whose size, shape and number vary greatly between people. Maps of tonotopy, the orderly layout of sound frequencies across the cortex, also cannot pin down A1's borders on their own. Without an accurate map, it is hard to understand normal hearing or to develop treatments for central auditory processing disorders.
Why it matters
A standardized map of human primary auditory cortex in normal-hearing people would give researchers a shared baseline for future studies. That baseline could help characterize, and eventually help develop treatments for, auditory processing deficits in hearing-impaired populations, including disorders rooted in central auditory processing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kevin Sitek
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience·Early-career
Use the frequency-following response, a scalp recording of how faithfully early auditory structures encode a sound, to determine when and where auditory-motor interactions occur during self-generated sounds, subcortically or in primary auditory cortex.
Manish Jha
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify patterns of resting-state functional connectivity linked to irritability, using 7 Tesla fMRI in 30 healthy adults and 60 adults with major depressive disorder.
Silvia Bunge
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether the anterior lateral prefrontal cortex is domain-general by measuring its fMRI activity and connections with other regions during four relational reasoning tasks spanning visual and auditory, spatial and semantic stimuli.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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