Circuits of Spatial Hearing

The ability to accurately locate a particular sound source is essential both for human communication (e.g. attending to a conversation in a noisy environment such as a party) as well as navigation (e.g. crossing a busy road). However, the manner in which auditory space is encoded in the mammalian brain is not understood. We employ a combination of optical, electrophysiological, and behavioural approaches in rodents to understand the fundamental circuit mechanisms that underlie the representation of space in the auditory cortex and superior colliculus and how these representations can be modified by the behavioral context.

Benedikt Grothe is Professor of Neurobiology at the Biocenter of the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich. He was appointed in 2014 as Max Planck Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence (at that time MPI of Neurobiology). The program‘s aim is to strengthen the cooperation between Max Planck Institutes and universities. The group's work will be closely linked to research of Tobias Bonhoeffer and Alexander Borst and their teams.