Deep neural networks effectively model neural adaptation to changing background noise and suggest nonlinear noise filtering methods in auditory cortex
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: The human auditory system displays a robust capacity to adapt to sudden changes in background noise, allowing for continuous speech comprehension despite changes in background environments. However, despite comprehensive studies characterizing this ability, the computations that underly this process are not well understood. The first step towards understanding a complex system is to propose a suitable model, but the classical and easily interpreted model for the auditory system, the spectro-temporal receptive field (STRF), cannot match the nonlinear neural dynamics involved in noise adaptation. Here, we utilize a deep neural network (DNN) to model neural adaptation to noise, illustrating its effectiveness at reproducing the complex dynamics at the levels of both individual electrodes and the cortical population. By closely inspecting the model's STRF-like computations over time, we find that the model alters both the gain and shape of its receptive field when adapting to a sudden noise change. We show that the DNN model's gain changes allow it to perform adaptive gain control, while the spectro-temporal change creates noise filtering by altering the inhibitory region of the model's receptive field. Further, we find that models of electrodes in nonprimary auditory cortex also exhibit noise filtering changes in their excitatory regions, suggesting differences in noise filtering mechanisms along the cortical hierarchy. These findings demonstrate the capability of deep neural networks to model complex neural adaptation and offer new hypotheses about the computations the auditory cortex performs to enable noise-robust speech perception in real-world, dynamic environments.
Source: NeuroImage
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
Awards: Functional and computational characterization of the human auditory cortex, Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Tools for modeling state-dependent sensory encoding by neural populations across spatial and temporal scales, Characterizing the temporal processing of speech in the human auditory cortex
OpenAlex ID: W4312083451