Carles Escera. Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience 
University of Barcelona. Website
Institute of Neurosciences. Faculty of Psychology. Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology. P. Vall d’Hebron 171, 08035-Barcelona. Spain
Reseach subject
Neural mechanisms of sound encoding and auditory perception in healthy humans and neurodevelopmental disorders
Summary
Research at my Brainlab focuses on how the human brain builds the auditory world around us to give rise to auditory perception. In particular, I am interested in how the brain extracts and models the implicit regularity in the acoustic environment to anticipate future sensory events, thereby supporting predictive perception. Our research uses mostly EEG to analyse evoked potentials and oscillatory activity, but often other methods, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and genetic analysis. Our results support the emerging view that regularity encoding and deviance detection is a pervasive property of the entire auditory system. In particular, our most recent results have revealed that the low ascending auditory pathway, even at the level of the midbrain, is involved in extracting abstract contingencies from discrete sounds in the auditory scene, and that timing predictability enhances regularity encoding. Also, using the so-called frequency-following response (FFR), we have found that children suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder tend to enhance, rather than suppress, their neural subcortical responses to repetitive stimulation, yielding to perceptual sensory inundation. These results are expanding our knowledge on how the auditory system is functionally organized to support auditory perception, and suggest that deep structures in the brain, such as the auditory midbrain, play a critical role in auditory cognition, contributing to speech, music and rhythm perception.
Publications
- Slabu, L., Grimm, S., & Escera, C. (2012). Novelty detection in the human auditory brainstem. Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 1447-1452.
- Recasens, M., Grimm, S, Capilla, A., Nowak, R., & Escera, C. (2014). Two sequential processes of change detection in hierarchically ordered areas of the human auditory cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 24, 143-153.
- Recasens, M., Leung, S., Grimm, S., Nowak, R., Escera, C. (2015). Repetition suppression and repetition enhancement underlie auditory memory‐trace formation in the human brain: an MEG study. Neuroimage, 108, 75-86.
- Selinger, L., Zarnowiek, K., Via, M., Clemente, I.C., Escera, C. (2016). Involvement of the serotonine transporter gene in accurate subcortical speech encoding. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(42), 10782-10790.
- Gorina-Careta, N., Zarnowiec, K., Costa-Faidella, J., & Escera, C. (2016). Timing predictability enhances regularity encoding in the human subcortical auditory pathway. Scientific Reports, 6:37405. doi: 10.1038/srep37405.