Duke Institute for Brain Sciences

How do our senses work together? Our eyes and ears cooperate to help us understand our environment. 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 theaters are located beside, and not behind, the screen. Research in my laboratory is devoted to investigating the question of how the brain coordinates audition and vision, combining information arising from the ears and eyes. We employ a combined computational and experimental approach to understanding the neural algorithms that underlie these processes. Techniques involve neurophysiology such as neural recording and microstimulation, combined with behaviors such as eye movements or performance on psychophysical tasks.

Currently active projects:

• Brain prostheses in the auditory system.
• Neural representations of spatial locations of visual and auditory stimuli
• Auditory learning, guided by vision (the ventriloquism effect)

Future interests:

• Music and motor learning

For more information, see my lab web site: www.duke.edu/~jmgroh

Ph.D, University of Pennsylvania, 1993

M.S. University of Michigan, 1990

A. B. Princeton University, 1988

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, in press.

Werner-Reiss, U. and Groh, JM. 2008. A rate code for sound azimuth in monkey auditory cortex: implications for human neuroimaging studies. Journal of Neuroscience. 28:3747-3758.

Porter, KK, Metzger, RR, and Groh, JM. 2007. Visual- and saccade-related signals in the primate inferior colliculus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104(45): 17855-60.