Stephen M. Town

Cortical cooling reveals a role for visual cortex in generating visual responses in auditory cortex

The paper uses cortical cooling to show that visual cortex inputs shape auditory cortex responses through direct excitation and network modulation in ferrets.

Head-Centred Sound Localisation Behaviour Reveals Head and World Centered Reference Frames in Auditory Cortex

This study shows that auditory cortex uses both head-centered and world-centered reference frames for sound localization, with head-centered coding dominant at the start but incorporating more world-centered information over time.

Reversible inactivation of ferret auditory cortex impairs spatial and non-spatial hearing

This study inactivates ferret auditory cortex using cooling or optogenetics to assess its role in spatial and non-spatial hearing, finding impairments in vowel discrimination in noise but not in clean or spatially separated conditions.

Behaviourally modulated hippocampal theta oscillations in the ferret persist during both locomotion and immobility

This study compares theta oscillations in ferrets and rats during locomotion and immobility, finding that ferrets maintain theta during immobility while rats switch to large irregular activity.

Seasonal weight changes in laboratory ferrets

This study establishes a normative weight dataset for female ferrets, showing seasonal weight fluctuations and the impact of water regulation on these changes.

Signal processing in auditory cortex underlies degraded speech sound discrimination in noise

This study investigates the role of auditory cortex in degraded speech sound discrimination in noise using inactivation and electrophysiology in ferrets, showing cortical contributions and adaptation mechanisms.

Primary auditory cortex represents the location of sound sources in a cue-invariant manner

The paper shows that neurons in primary auditory cortex represent sound source locations independently of spatial cues and supports a labelled line model over a two-channel model for spatial perception.

Integration of visual information in auditory cortex promotes auditory scene analysis through multisensory binding

The paper shows that visual signals enhance auditory cortex representations when temporally coherent with sound, supporting multisensory binding for auditory scene analysis.

Multiplexed and multivariate representations of sound identity during perceptual constancy

The paper investigates how the auditory system represents sound identity in a way that is tolerant to transformations, finding that neural representations are multivariate, multiplexed, and modulated by attention and experience.

Egocentric and Allocentric Representations in Auditory Cortex

This study identifies two types of auditory cortex neurons in freely moving ferrets: one encoding sound location relative to the head and another relative to the world.