SS02: TINNITUS: MECHANISMS AND TREATMENT

AUDITORY NEURAL PLASTICITY IN NORMAL HEARING AND IN TINNITUS

Larry Roberts

Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

One goal of our research is to understand how acoustic experience modifies neural representations for sound in the human auditory cortex. Current findings show that neural population phase is modified in the auditory core region by such experience, while tonotopic representations are less mutable in the normal hearing brain. We are also investigating whether the rules that describe remodeling in tinnitus are different. Current research is asking whether acoustic training in the tinnitus frequency region can create a hole in the tinnitus percept for the trained sound.