Research Interests for Jennifer M. Groh

Research Interests: Perception, Cognitive Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience

Research in my laboratory concerns how sensory and motor systems work together, and how neural representations play a combined role in sensorimotor and cognitive processing (embodied cognition). Most of our work concerns the interactions between vision and hearing. We frequently perceive visual and auditory stimuli as being bound together if they seem likely to have arisen from a common source. That's why we tend not to notice that the speakers on TV sets or in movie theatres are located beside, and not behind, the screen. Research in my laboratory is devoted to investigating the question of how the brain coordinates the information arising from the ears and eyes. Our findings challenge the historical view of the brain's sensory processing as being automatic, autonomous, and immune from outside influence. We have recently established that neurons in the auditory pathway (inferior colliculus, auditory cortex) alter their responses to sound depending on where the eyes are pointing. This finding suggests that the different sensory pathways meddle in one another's supposedly private affairs, making their respective influences felt even at very early stages of processing. The process of bringing the signals from two different sensory pathways into a common frame of reference begins at a surprisingly early point along the primary sensory pathways.

Keywords:
Action Potentials, Anorexia Nervosa, audition, Auditory Cortex, Auditory Pathways, Auditory Perception, Behavior, Behavior, Animal, Brain, Brain Mapping, coordinate transformation, Electrodes, Electrophysiology, Eye Movements, Head Movements, hearing, Hearing, Humans, Inferior Colliculi, Inferior colliculus, Models, Biological, multisensory, Parietal Lobe, reference frame, saccade, Saccades, sensorimotor, Sound, Sound Localization, Space Perception, Superior Colliculi, Superior colliculus, vision, Visual Cortex, Visual Pathways, Visual Perception
Representative Publications   (search)
  1. Groh, JM, Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are (November, 2014), Harvard University Press [catalog.php] [abs].
  2. Groh, JM; Lee, J, Different Stimuli, Different Spatial Codes: A Visual Map and an Auditory Rate Code for Oculomotor Space in the Primate Superior Colliculus, PLoS One, vol. 9 no. 1 (January, 2014), pp. e85017, PLoS [journal.pone.0085017], [doi] [abs].
  3. Pages, DS; Groh, JM, Looking at the ventriloquist: visual outcome of eye movements calibrates sound localization., PLoS One, vol. 8 no. 8 (2013), pp. e72562 [24009691], [doi] [abs].
  4. Lee, J; Groh, JM, Auditory signals evolve from hybrid- to eye-centered coordinates in the primate superior colliculus., Journal of neurophysiology, vol. 108 no. 1 (July, 2012), pp. 227-242 [22514295], [doi] [abs].
  5. Bulkin, DA; Groh, JM, Distribution of eye position information in the monkey inferior colliculus., Journal of neurophysiology, vol. 107 no. 3 (February, 2012), pp. 785-795 [doi] [abs].
  6. DA Bulkin, JM Groh, Distribution of visual and saccade related information in the monkey inferior colliculus., Frontiers in neural circuits, vol. 6 (2012), pp. 61 [doi] [abs].
  7. Kopco, N; Lin, I-F; Shinn-Cunningham, BG; Groh, JM, Reference frame of the ventriloquism aftereffect., The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, vol. 29 no. 44 (November, 2009), pp. 13809-13814 [19889992], [doi] [abs].
  8. Mullette-Gillman, O. A., Cohen, Y. E. and Groh, JM., Motor-related signals in the intraparietal cortex encode locations in a hybrid, rather than eye-centered, reference frame, Cerebral Cortex, vol. 19 no. 8 (2009), pp. 1761-1775 [abs].
  9. Porter, KK; Metzger, RR; Groh, JM, Visual- and saccade-related signals in the primate inferior colliculus., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, vol. 104 no. 45 (November, 2007), pp. 17855-17860 [17978183], [doi] [abs] [author's comments].
  10. Mullette-Gillman, OA; Cohen, YE; Groh, JM, Eye-centered, head-centered, and complex coding of visual and auditory targets in the intraparietal sulcus., Journal of neurophysiology, vol. 94 no. 4 (October, 2005), pp. 2331-2352 [doi] [abs].
  11. Werner-Reiss, U; Kelly, KA; Trause, AS; Underhill, AM; Groh, JM, Eye position affects activity in primary auditory cortex of primates., Current biology : CB, vol. 13 no. 7 (April, 2003), pp. 554-562 [doi] [abs].
  12. Groh, JM; Trause, AS; Underhill, AM; Clark, KR; Inati, S, Eye position influences auditory responses in primate inferior colliculus., Neuron, vol. 29 no. 2 (February, 2001), pp. 509-518 (This article was featured on the cover of the journal.) [doi] [abs].
  13. Groh, JM, Converting neural signals from place codes to rate codes., Biological cybernetics, vol. 85 no. 3 (September, 2001), pp. 159-165 [doi] [abs].
  14. Groh, JM; Born, RT; Newsome, WT, How is a sensory map read Out? Effects of microstimulation in visual area MT on saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements., The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, vol. 17 no. 11 (June, 1997), pp. 4312-4330 [doi] [abs].
  15. Groh, JM; Sparks, DL, Saccades to somatosensory targets. III. eye-position-dependent somatosensory activity in primate superior colliculus., Journal of neurophysiology, vol. 75 no. 1 (January, 1996), pp. 439-453 [doi] [abs].