Dan H Sanes

• Auditory development, perception, and learning
• Impact of social experience on auditory behavior
• Hearing loss

Virtually all human skills, from crawling to aural communication, develop slowly and depend on concerted practice. Our lab studies the neural mechanisms that support the emergence of adult perceptual and cognitive skills, especially the role played by early experience. ​To explore these questions, we record wirelessly from auditory cortex and downstream cortical areas while gerbils practice, and improve on, auditory behavioral tasks. This includes a social learning paradigm in which behavioral performance is facilitated when gerbils initially listen to a demonstrator that is performing an auditory task that is to be mastered.

At the other extreme, we study how diminished developmental experience, such as a brief period of hearing loss, can impair both sensory processing and skill learning. Thus, even a transient period of hearing loss can degrade psychometric performance on auditory tasks, and this is correlated with degraded auditory cortex processing. One general idea is that these deficits are due, in part, to permanent changes to synapse function within the auditory cortex. Thus, a primary translational goal of our research is to determine whether normal perceptual skills can be restored by rescuing inhibitory synapse function in hearing loss-reared animals.