Symposium
S6 - Neuronal circuit mechanisms for auditory cognition: from learning to communication
Chair
Belen Pardi
IPNP, Inserm, Francia
This symposium highlights how the brain actively interprets sound, integrating sensory inputs with prior experience to support learning, memory, and context-dependent behavior. Speakers will showcase cutting-edge research on auditory circuits—from thalamo-cortical pathways shaping perception and memory, to premotor and mirroring neurons in songbirds encoding self-generated vocalizations—revealing how auditory processing underlies communication, emotion, and adaptive behavior. Together, these talks illuminate the neural mechanisms that link hearing to cognition and the ways they can go awry in neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Jan Gründermann
German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Germany
Fear Loops: Thalamo-cortico-limbic dynamics of aversive learning
Growing evidence supports the view that first- and higher-order sensory thalamus is an active participant in adaptive behavior rather than a solely passive sensory relay. The auditory thalamus (medial geniculate body, MGB) is necessary for auditory fear conditioning and we have identified state-dependent plastic MGB neurons whose responses are selectively reshaped during high fear states and fear extinction. This plasticity is mediated by cholinergic control. In addition to classical auditory fear conditioning, which results in passive freezing behavior, MGB activity patterns are furthermore changed during learned escape and active avoidance. These dynamic changes in MGB activity are accompanied by changes in inhibitory regulation from the thalamic reticular nucleus, suggesting circuit-level control of thalamic plasticity across behavioral states.
Kishore Kuchibhotla
John Hopkins University, United States of America
Latent knowledge in cortical circuits
Learning is usually inferred from performance, yet behavior need not faithfully reveal what an animal knows. We find that mice acquire sound–reward contingencies within tens of trials, hundreds to thousands of trials before stable discrimination emerges. This temporal gap exposes latent task knowledge that conventional measures of performance miss and allows us to distinguish the neural mechanisms of learning from those governing its expression. Auditory cortex (AC) plays a selective role in this dissociation: it is required for learning but dispensable for expert performance. This role is not explained by sensory re-tuning or map expansion. Instead, learning and performance engage distinct higher-order computations in AC: reward prediction during rapid acquisition and action suppression as behavior stabilizes. These computations are carried by spatially clustered ensembles whose organization is orthogonal to classical stimulus-tuning maps, revealing a cortical architecture structured not only by sensory features but also by the computations required to learn and act. We are now extending this question to continual learning: how is prior knowledge organized and reused as new tasks are encountered? I will close by extending the idea of latent knowledge from a single task to continual learning across many, using our new, fully automated home-cage platform—the Continual Learning Mouse Playground—as a foundation to understand how brains discover the latent structure of a multi-dimensional task space.
Ana Amador
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Departamento de Fisica, Argentina
Neural coding of complex auditory stimuli in songbirds
Ana Amador will talk about how songbirds process and encode complex auditory signals, focusing on how hearing is essential both for learning and maintaining their songs. She will describe how brain circuits in songbirds—particularly the premotor nucleus HVC, which receives input from auditory cortex—contain neurons that respond selectively to the bird’s own song and show “mirroring” activity during both singing and listening. Her recent work highlights how neural activity in HVC synchronizes with the rhythm of song, providing insight into how complex sounds are represented in the brain.
Belén Pardi
IPNP, Inserm, France
Auditory thalamocortical interactions for adaptive perception
Perception is an active process by which the brain makes sense of the surrounding world, continuously integrating sensory signals with internal priors. This process is profoundly affected in major psychiatric disorders, yet the circuit mechanisms that support it—and how they are disrupted in psychosis—remain poorly understood. Recent studies have highlighted the contribution of higher-order sensory thalamo-cortical circuits in processing internal signals. In this talk, I will present our work investigating the role of auditory circuits in memory-related processing and discuss our recent efforts to uncover how their dysfunction may contribute to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.