Looking at Sounds: Neural Mechanisms in the Primate Brain

When you hear a salient sound, it is natural to look at it to find out what is happening. Orienting the eyes to look at sounds is essential to our ability to identify and understand the events occurring in our environment. This behavior involves both sensorimotor and multisensory integration: a sound elicits a movement of the visual sense organ, the eye, to bring the source of the sound under visual scrutiny. How are auditory signals converted into oculomotor commands? This chapter describes recent work concerning the necessary computational steps between sound and eye movement, and how they may be implemented in neural populations in the primate brain.

Duke Scholars

Author Jennifer M. Groh Psychology & Neuroscience