Liu Lab
Principal Investigator: Robert C Liu
Institution: Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Acoustic communication is critical for normal social interactions in many species, including humans, yet our knowledge of how the auditory system functions in more naturalistic social communication settings is limited. In particular, we need a more detailed understanding for how the vocabulary of sounds that carry socially commu- nicative meaning (e.g. speech sounds for humans) becomes established and grows through experience. Hu- mans are especially good at learning a diversity of sounds that convey similar meanings – a prerequisite for rich semantic categories in languages – but how and where the brain learns to fuse new spectrotemporal signals with behaviorally synonymous ones into one “schema” is rarely investigated at the cellular, circuit or network level. There is thus a gap in knowledge about detailed mechanisms supporting learning the social meaning of new communication sounds. The basic associative processes that must link distinct stimuli to the same pheno- typic behavior also exist in experimentally accessible mammals like mice, for whom such learning can also have adaptive value, especially for hearing these socially important sounds in complex soundsca…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DC008343-18: Functional approach to communication sound processing in mouse auditory cortex (2026)
- 5R01DC008343-17: Functional approach to communication sound processing in mouse auditory cortex (2025)
- 2R01DC008343-16A1: Functional approach to communication sound processing in mouse auditory cortex (2024)
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