Wuzhou Yang (Daniel Polley's Lab)

Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School , U.S.A 

I am currently a postdoc researcher in Prof. Daniel Polley’s lab at MEE, Harvard Medical School, where I investigate the subcortical neuronal circuitry mechanisms underlying auditory pattern recognition. I earned a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Basel in Switzerland under the mentorship of Prof. Silvia Arber.

Neurons in the central auditory pathway offer temporal processing par excellence in the brain. The intrinsic, synaptic, and circuit specializations that support high-fidelity, high-speed feature extraction in subcortical auditory centers have been extensively characterized. The other end of the temporal processing spectrum - encoding slowly varying temporal features - is an essential building block for the perception of important features in speech (e.g., prosody), music (e.g., rhythm), and segregation of auditory foreground objects from background sounds but has received far less attention. A recent study from our lab demonstrated an inverse hierarchy for specialized processing of rapid and slowly modulated sound features (Asokan et al., Curr. Biol 2021). This study identified a tradeoff between the inferior colliculus (IC) and primary auditory cortex (A1), with the IC offering excellent resolution of local features and poor sensitivity to slowly emerging features and A1 offering the opposite specialization. Recordings from the ventral subdivision of the medial geniculate body (MGBv) were somewhere in between, offering weak sensitivity to slow rhythmic patterns and middling resolution of rapidly modulated features. Here, we have revisited temporal processing in the auditory thalamus with an expanded emphasis on higher-order thalamic subdivisions, which are known to be the among the first sites of time-to-rate conversions for encoding envelope modulation rate and could therefore feature sensitivity to slowly emerging temporal patterns the matches or even exceeds the auditory cortex (Bartlett and Wang, J. Neurophys 2011). We performed simultaneous recordings from single units in the MGBv and higher-order auditory thalamus in unanesthetized head-fixed mice while presenting noise bursts separated by inter-burst intervals (IBIs) at different lengths to generate burst trains, we found that thalamic neurons exploited different encoding strategies to represent burst trains with short or long IBIs. Moreover, by arranging the IBIs separating consecutive noise bursts randomly or in a pattern (i.e., a rhythm), we revealed the activity of thalamic neurons emerged during the establishment of temporal patterns. Our findings open a door for further investigating the function of the auditory thalamus in processing complex temporal patterns.

Wuzhou's google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4WJSgvYAAAAJ