Eye position influences auditory responses in primate inferior colliculus.
Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data
Animal electrophysiology research with no human data
PubMed 11239439 · doi:10.1016/s0896-6273(01)00222-7
What was done
The authors recorded single-neuron auditory responses in the inferior colliculus (IC) of monkeys while the animals fixated visual targets at different locations to determine the auditory spatial frame of reference.
What was found
Eye position modulated auditory response magnitude in 33% of encountered neurons without shifting their spatial tuning. The magnitude of eye-position modulation was comparable to that of sound location, interacting with auditory responses in at least a partly multiplicative manner.
Why it matters
This study shows that reference frame transformations from head-centered to eye-centered auditory coordinates begin as early as the inferior colliculus using gain-field modulation.
Limits
The abstract does not state the number of monkeys or the total number of neurons recorded. It is an animal physiology study with inferred rather than directly measured downstream decoding.
Cited by
- supports Eye movements modulate auditory neural signals across early auditory pathway structures outside the superior colliculus.