Neural substrates underlying auditory social cognition

The goal of Catherine's research is to understand how the brain enables us to successfully communicate with each other. A crucial aspect of this ability is how the listener’s brain extracts and represents relevant social information from the communicated message. During this fellowship, she will investigate where and how auditory communication signals are encoded in the brains of mice during natural social interactions. She will use a novel and powerful approach combining ethologically-relevant communicative behaviour (in collaboration with Professor Erich Jarvis, Duke University) with large-scale neuronal ensemble recordings and molecular-genetic manipulations (with Dr Daniel Bendor, UCL).