Office: 3425 Tolman Hall
e: theunissen@berkeley.edu
w: Auditory Science Lab

• Neural basis of vocal learning in songbirds
• Auditory physiology
• Speech perception

Frederic Theunissen

Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Department of Psychology

The overarching goal of our laboratory is to understand how complex natural sounds, such as human speech, music and animal vocalizations, are detected and recognized by the brain.  We study the nature of the communication signals used by humans (speech and music) and animals using behavioral and statistical approaches. We study the auditory system of humans and songbirds using neurophysiological techniques. We use computational methods to generate theories of audition, to study sounds and to analyze our neural data.

Publications

>>View complete list of publications by Frederic Theunissen on Pubmed

Holdgraf CR, Rieger JW, Micheli C, Martin S, Knight RT, and Theunissen FE. “Encoding and Decoding Models in Cognitive Electrophysiology.” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (2017).

Kaardal JT, Theunissen FE, and Sharpee TO. “A Low-Rank Method for Characterizing High-Level Neural Computations.” Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (2017).

de Heer WA, Huth AG, Griffiths TL, Gallant JL and Theunissen FE. “The Hierarchical Cortical Organization of Human Speech Processing.” Journal of Neuroscience (2017).

Elie JE and Theunissen FE. “The vocal repertoire of the domesticated zebra finch: a data-driven approach to decipher the information-bearing acoustic features of communication signals.” Anim Cogn (2016).

Elie JE and Theunissen FE. “Meaning in the avian auditory cortex: neural representation of communication calls.” Eur J Neurosci (2015).

Lee T and Theunissen F. “A single microphone noise reduction algorithm based on the detection and reconstruction of spectro-temporal features.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (2015).