Mitchell Sutter
Professor
mlsutter (at) ucdavis (dot) edu
Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior
Center for Neuroscience
Office
Center for Neuroscience, 1544 Newton Court
(530) 757-8849
Degrees:
1991
PhD
University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley
(Bioengineering)
1985
BS
Brown University
(Bioengineering)
Research Interests:
How can we tell the sound of an alarm clock from a barking dog, or of an ambulance siren from a car horn? How do animals process vocalizations or humans process speach? How can we stand in a crowded cocktail party and understand one person's speech while our ears are bombarded with sounds from a barage of sources: 100 other people talking, cell phones, air conditioners, glasses jingling, backgroud music? To answer these questions we need a fundamental knowledge of hearing and how the brain analyzes sounds. Our lab's research focuses on these fundamental questions.
From reading a neurobiology textbook, one might get the impression that, with the exception of sound localization, most of hearing can be explained by the cochlea breaking sounds into different frequency or pitch components. There is a good reason for this predominant view. Most auditory physiology has focused on the cochlea and its output, the aspects of hearing; however little is now about what role the brainstem, midbrain, thalamus, and auditory cortex (for simplicity I will call thes 'higher areas') play in sound perception. A goal of our research is to elucidate how 'higher' brain areas, contribute to hearing, witha particular emphasis on the role of auditory cotex. We believe 'higher' levels of the brain are essential for hearing in the complex environments encountered by all animals.
To pursue our goals, this lab emphasizes several themes. Theme (1) focuses on the importance of integrating the auditory nerve's output at 'higher' brain levels. Specifically, we have been demontrating that the processing of complex sounds and auditory 'scenes' requires a conceptual expansion beyond the most commonly employed description of hearing: the critical band model. Theme (2) highlights how the auditory system non-linearly integrates sound element such as a complex chord or an individual syllable. Temporal properties refer to slower variations in time, such as putting together several notes to make a word. Theme (3) emphasized the functional organization of auditory cortex. To address these themes, we investigate auditory system performance through psychophysics, and underlying mechanisms by recording single neuron's responses to sound. Each emplyed species and experimental model has it's own unique advantages to address different questions.
CBS Graduate Group Affiliations:
Neuroscience
Publications:
Last updated 5/21/2010
Loftus, W.C. and Sutter, M.L. (2001) Spectro-temporal organization of
excitatory and inhibitory receptive fields of cat posterior auditory
field neurons. J. Neurophysiol. 86: 475-491.
O'Connor KN and ML Sutter. 2000. Global spectral and location effects in auditory perceptual grouping. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. :in press
Sutter, M.L. (2000) Shapes and level tolerances of frequency tuning
curves in primary auditory cortex: quantitative measures, and
population codes. J. Neurophysiol. 84(2): 1012-1025
Sutter, M.L., Petkov, C., Baynes, K., O;Connor, K.N. (2000) Auditory
scene analysis in dyslexics. Neuroreport. 11: 1967-1971
O'Connor, K.N., Barruel, P. and Sutter, M.L. (2000) Global processing
of spectrally complex sounds in macaques (Macaca mullata) and humans.
J. Comp. Physiol, 186:903-912.
Schreiner, C.E., Read, H., and Sutter, M.L. (2000). Modular
organization of frequency integration in cat auditory cortex. Annual
Review Neuroscience 23: 501-529
O'Connor KN, PB Barruel, R Hajalilou, and ML Sutter. 1999. Auditory temporal integration in the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 106:954-965
Sutter ML, CE Schreiner, M McLean, KN O'Connor, and WC Loftus. 1999. . Organization of inhibitory frequency receptive fields in cat primary auditory cortex. :in press
Laboratory Personnel:
Sutter
Mitch Sutter, Phillip Barruel, Krithi Ravindranath, Topher Kessler, Kevin O'Connor and Chris Petkov
Teaching Interests:
Neurobiology. Hearing. Modeling.