Speakers

How are sounds located in the environment? Dr. McCullagh will talk about her past and current research on brainstem level sound processing in a genetic form of autism, Fragile X Syndrome. Sensory systems play an important role in integrating information from an animal’s environment to drive appropriate behavioral responses. The process of locating a sound starts by integrating acoustic cues received by both ears which are then compared in the auditory brainstem of mammals. The auditory brainstem circuit has classically been treated as hardware that rarely gets updated or altered due to its essential task of locating sounds. However, work by Dr. McCullagh and others have shown that there is ongoing modulation of this circuit throughout life. Specifically, the auditory brainstem can be used as a model circuit to study different factors that alter basic neural computations in the brain that lead to neural plasticity and auditory symptoms in autism.