TY - JOUR T1 - Sparse Codes for Speech Predict Spectrotemporal Receptive Fields in the Inferior Colliculus A1 - Carlson, Nicole L. A1 - Ming, Vivienne L. A1 - DeWeese, Michael Robert Y1 - 2012/07/12 N2 - Author Summary The receptive field of a neuron can be thought of as the stimulus that most strongly causes it to be active. Scientists have long been interested in discovering the underlying principles that determine the structure of receptive fields of cells in the auditory pathway to better understand how our brains process sound. One possible way of predicting these receptive fields is by using a theoretical model such as a sparse coding model. In such a model, each sound is represented by the smallest possible number of active model neurons chosen from a much larger group. A primary question addressed in this study is whether the receptive fields of model neurons optimized for natural sounds will predict receptive fields of actual neurons. Here, we use a sparse coding model on speech data. We find that our model neurons do predict receptive fields of auditory neurons, specifically in the Inferior Colliculus (midbrain) as well as the thalamus and cortex. To our knowledge, this is the first time any theoretical model has been able to predict so many of the diverse receptive fields of the various cell-types in those areas. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 7 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002594 SP - e1002594 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002594 ER -