Auditory perceptual skills mature over a broad time course (in humans), some well into teenage years. Presumably because these immature percepts are vulnerable to sensory experience, early forms of hearing loss (HL) can lead to long-lasting deficits in auditory perception and language acquisition. While the behavioral effects of early hearing loss have been established in humans and animal models, it is currently unknown whether early auditory training can influence perception or, more importantly, whether it can rescue the deficits attending HL. The proposed experiments will first examine perceptual maturation to sinusoidally modulated amplitude (sAM) and then assess whether early sensory experience, (passive exposure or training), can influence adult perception. The focus will be to determine if this can ameliorate the perceptual deficits in adult animals with developmental HL. How neural coding properties in auditory cortex (ACx) respond to early sensory experience will then be correlated to behavioral performance. The central hypothesis of this proposal is that, for animals with developmental HL, early training on an auditory task will restore behavioral performance and the central coding properties that support perception. There are three related experimental aims.
The FIRST AIM will determine when auditory perception for signals important for communication (sAM), matures in animals trained on an operant conditioning paradigm.
The SECOND AIM will examine the effect of early sensory experience on perceptual abilities at this auditory task and then determine whether these forms of early auditory experience can ameliorate perceptual deficits in animals with developmental HL.
The THIRD AIM will determine whether the coding properties of neurons in ACx correlate to the perceptual abilities (from Aim 2) and are similarly influenced by the auditory experience. Together these data will provide the first analysis of behavioral training and auditory perceptual maturation in young animals and will reveal whether training strategies can be used to ameliorate deficits following hearing loss. These studies have direct relevance to public health. The experiments will reveal if auditory perception and central auditory function, either, fail to develop normally or mature normally but regress due to early hearing loss. Furthermore, whether early sensory environments ameliorate perceptual deficits through altering central auditory function is imperative for clinical intervention of early hearing loss.
| Sarro, Emma C; Sanes, Dan H (2014) Few juvenile auditory perceptual skills correlate with adult performance. Behav Neurosci 128:29-41 |
| Sarro, Emma C; Sanes, Dan H (2011) The cost and benefit of juvenile training on adult perceptual skill. J Neurosci 31:5383-91 |
| Sarro, Emma C; Sanes, Dan H (2010) Prolonged maturation of auditory perception and learning in gerbils. Dev Neurobiol 70:636-48 |
