Toward a neurobiology of auditory object perception: What can we learn from the songbird forebrain?

In the acoustic world, no sounds occur entirely in isolation; they always reach the ears in combination with other sounds. How any given sound is discriminated and perceived as an independent auditory object is a challenging question in neuroscience. Although our knowledge of neural processing in the auditory pathway has expanded over the years, no good theory exists to explain how perception of auditory objects is achieved. A growing body of evidence suggests that the selectivity of neurons in the auditory forebrain is under dynamic modulation, and this plasticity may contribute to auditory object perception. We propose that stimulus-specific adaptation in the auditory forebrain of the songbird (and perhaps in other systems) may play an important role in modulating sensitivity in a way that aids discrimination, and thus can potentially contribute to auditory object perception [Current Zoology 57 (6): 671–683, 2011].