Katherine C Wood

Katherine C Wood
The University of Sheffield | Sheffield

PhD

About

32
Publications
3,601
Reads
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515
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - present
University of Pennsylvania
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
September 2011 - December 2015
University College London
Field of study
  • Neuroscience
September 2009 - June 2010
University College London
Field of study
  • Neuroscience
October 2002 - June 2006
University of Oxford
Field of study
  • Biochemistry

Publications

Publications (32)
Article
Full-text available
Neurons throughout the sensory pathway adapt their responses depending on the statistical structure of the sensory environment. Contrast gain control is a form of adaptation in the auditory cortex, but it is unclear whether the dynamics of gain control reflect efficient adaptation, and whether they shape behavioral perception. Here, we trained mice...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cortical neuronal populations can use a multitude of codes to represent information, each with different advantages and trade-offs. The auditory cortex represents sounds via a sparse code, which lies on the continuum between a localist representation with different cells responding to different sounds, and a distributed representation, in which eac...
Article
Full-text available
A key question in auditory neuroscience is to what extent are brain regions functionally specialized for processing specific sound features such as location and identity. In auditory cortex, correlations between neural activity and sounds support both the specialization of distinct cortical subfields, and encoding of multiple sound features within...
Article
Full-text available
Learning to avoid dangerous signals while preserving normal responses to safe stimuli is essential for everyday behavior and survival. Following identical experiences, subjects exhibit fear specificity ranging from high (specializing fear to only the dangerous stimulus) to low (generalizing fear to safe stimuli), yet the neuronal basis of fear spec...
Preprint
Full-text available
A key question in auditory neuroscience is to what extent are brain regions functionally specialized for processing specific sound features such as sound location and identity. In auditory cortex, correlations between neural activity and sounds support both the specialization of distinct cortical subfields, and encoding of multiple sound features w...
Preprint
Full-text available
The efficient coding hypothesis postulates that neurons shape their response properties to match their dynamic range to the statistics of incoming signals. However, whether and how the dynamics of efficient neuronal adaptation inform behavior has not been directly shown. Here, we trained mice to detect a target presented in background noise shortly...
Preprint
Full-text available
Learning to avoid dangerous signals while preserving normal behavioral responses to safe stimuli is essential for everyday behavior and survival. Like other forms of learning, fear learning has a high level of inter-subject variability. Following an identical fear conditioning protocol, different subjects exhibit a range of fear specificity. Under...
Article
Full-text available
Neural systems can be modeled as complex networks in which neural elements are represented as nodes linked to one another through structural or functional connections. The resulting network can be analyzed using mathematical tools from network science and graph theory to quantify the system’s topological organization and to better understand its fu...
Preprint
Full-text available
The ability to recognize sounds in noise is a key part of hearing, and the mechanisms by which the brain identifies sounds in noise are of considerable interest to scientists, clinicians and engineers. Yet we know little about the necessity of regions such as auditory cortex for hearing in noise, or how cortical processing of sounds is adversely af...
Article
Full-text available
Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex underlies our perception of sound sources in space remains unclear. Specifically, whether neurons in auditory cortex represent spatial cues or an integrated representation of auditory space across cues is not known. Here, we measured the spatial receptive f...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural systems can be modeled as complex networks in which neural elements are represented as nodes linked to one another through structural or functional connections. The resulting network can be analyzed using mathematical tools from network science and graph theory to quantify the system's topological organization and to better understand its fu...
Preprint
Neural systems can be modeled as networks of functionally connected neural elements. The resulting network can be analyzed using mathematical tools from network science and graph theory to quantify the system's topological organization and to better understand its function. While the network-based approach is common in the analysis of large-scale n...
Article
Full-text available
Perceptual constancy requires neural representations that are selective for object identity, but also tolerant across identity-preserving transformations. How such representations arise in the brain and support perception remains unclear. Here, we study tolerant representation of sound identity in the auditory system by recording neural activity in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Auditory cortex is required for sound localisation, but how neural firing in auditory cortex underlies our perception of sources in space remains unknown. We measured spatial receptive fields in animals actively attending to spatial location while they performed a relative localisation task using stimuli that varied in the spatial cues that they pr...
Article
Full-text available
Observers performed a relative localisation task in which they reported whether the second of two sequentially presented signals occurred to the left or right of the first. Stimuli were detectability-matched auditory, visual, or auditory-visual signals and the goal was to compare changes in performance with eccentricity across modalities. Visual pe...
Preprint
Observers performed a relative localisation task in which they reported whether the second of two sequentially presented signals occurred to the left or right of the first. Stimuli were detectability-matched auditory, visual, or auditory-visual signals and the goal was to compare changes in performance with eccentricity across modalities. Visual pe...
Article
Full-text available
How and where in the brain audio-visual signals are bound to create multimodal objects remains unknown. One hypothesis is that temporal coherence between dynamic multisensory signals provides a mechanism for binding stimulus features across sensory modalities. Here, we report that when the luminance of a visual stimulus is temporally coherent with...
Preprint
Full-text available
How and where in the brain audio-visual signals are bound to create multimodal objects remains unknown. One hypothesis is that temporal coherence between dynamic multisensory signals provides a mechanism for binding stimulus features across sensory modalities. Here we report that when the luminance of a visual stimulus is temporally coherent with t...
Article
Inhibitory and excitatory neurons form intricate interconnected circuits in the mammalian sensory cortex. Whereas the function of excitatory neurons is largely to integrate and transmit information within and between brain areas, inhibitory neurons are thought to shape the way excitatory neurons integrate information, and they exhibit context-speci...
Preprint
Perceptual constancy requires neural representations that are selective for object identity, but also tolerant for identity-preserving transformations. How such representations arise in the brain and contribute to perception remains unclear. Here we studied tolerant representations of sound identity in the auditory system by recording multi-unit ac...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of acute inactivation of brain areas by cooling in the behaving ferret and to demonstrate that cooling auditory cortex produced a localisation deficit that was specific to auditory stimuli. The effect of cooling on neural activity was measured in anesthetized ferret cortex. The behavioural...
Article
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Article
Full-text available
With increasing numbers of children and adults receiving bilateral cochlear implants, there is an urgent need for assessment tools that enable testing of binaural hearing abilities. Current test batteries are either limited in scope or are of an impractical duration for routine testing. Here, we report a behavioral test that enables combined testin...
Thesis
The present work tested two competing hypotheses about how the location of sounds in space is encoded by auditory cortex. The labelled-line hypothesis says that each azimuthal location is encoded by maximal firing of a specific small and sharply tuned population of neurons. The two-channel hypothesis says that a sound location is encoded by the rel...
Article
Full-text available
Spatial acuity varies with sound-source azimuth, signal-to-noise ratio, and the spectral characteristics of the sound source. Here, the spatial localisation abilities of listeners were assessed using a relative localisation task. This task tested localisation ability at fixed angular separations throughout space using a two-alternative forced-choic...
Article
Timbre distinguishes sounds of equal loudness, pitch, and duration; however, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying timbre perception. Such understanding requires animal models such as the ferret in which neuronal and behavioral observation can be combined. The current study asked what spectral cues ferrets use to discriminate betwe...
Article
Full-text available
Genetically-encoded biosensors are powerful tools for understanding cellular signal transduction mechanisms. In aiming to investigate cGMP signaling in neurones using the EGFP-based fluorescent biosensor, FlincG (fluorescent indicator for cGMP), we encountered weak or non-existent fluorescence after attempted transfection with plasmid DNA, even in...
Poster
Neurons in ferret auditory cortex respond to simple visual stimuli such as an LED and auditory responses to white noise can be modulated by the presence of such visual stimuli (Bizley et al., 2007). Visual influences on auditory cortical neurons may result from input connections from a variety of areas — including visual cortex, parietal cortex and...
Article
Full-text available
Nitric oxide (NO) is a widespread signaling molecule with potentially multifarious actions of relevance to health and disease. A fundamental determinant of how it acts is its concentration, but there remains a lack of coherent information on the patterns of NO release from its sources, such as neurons or endothelial cells, in either normal or patho...

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