David McAlpine is Professor of Hearing, Language and the Brain in Sydney (Australia). He is currently focusing on a form of learning that occurs primarily through auditory perception, referred to as statistical learning. This unconscious process takes place continuously in the brain as it perceives and automatically scans the environment for information in order to learn how to distinguish important acoustic input from background noise. The team led by Professor McAlpine and Livia de Hoz (Charité - Universitätsmedizin) will work in conjunction with the Collaborative Research Center "Mechanisms and Disturbances in Memory Consolidation" to record the neuronal structures of the auditory brain in mice and investigate the types of noise that assist statistical learning. To achieve this, the project will focus on neuronal circuits and cellular mechanisms.
In the second phase of the project, following the extension of funding, the focus will be on understanding how behavior, the predictability of sounds, and active attention influence hearing. In addition, the findings will be applied to experiments involving neurodiverse individuals to explore how this learning process may differ in their case. The aim is to deepen our understanding of how the brain learns patterns in the world—particularly in the auditory domain—and to contribute to advancements in hearing technology.
