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SOM Faculty Candidate Seminar

Eliades headshot
Friday, September 18, 2020
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Steven Eliades, MD, PhD

Duke welcomes Steven Eliades, MD, PhD, (University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine) to give his talk "Speaking and Hearing: What marmosets can teach us about the sensory-motor control of voice and the origins of vocal communication."
(Please contact d.shipman@duke.edu for Zoom connection info.)
Abstract: Vocal communication is an important social behavior shared between both humans and animals. Successful communication, however, requires self-monitoring in order to detect and correct production errors and adapt to variations in the acoustical environment. When this process is impaired, as in hearing loss and deafness, humans have difficulty acquiring and maintaining normal speech. Our recent work in marmosets, a vocal non-human primate species, has begun to reveal how the auditory system encodes sensory feedback during vocal production and the role of top-down sensory prediction in detecting vocal errors. These mechanisms play an important role in moment-to-moment feedback-dependent vocal control. Early results also suggest complex social communication behaviors amongst marmosets that share many features of human conversation, and may be a novel approach for future study of neural mechanisms underlying auditory decision making, naturalistic sensory processing, and sensory-motor control.