Abstract:
Our primary research interest is the structure and function of the auditory brain. Over the last 20 years, I have focused on the neurophysiological mechanisms that govern neuronal adaptation and the relationship between stimulus-specific adaptation and mismatch negativity.
Stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) is the reduction in the responses to a common sound relative to the same sound when rare and was originally described in the primary auditory cortex as the neuronal correlate of the mismatch negativity (MMN). The neural sources of MMN have been located mainly within non-primary auditory cortex in humans and animal models.
In this talk, I will show our recent findings on recordings from single neurons in the auditory subcortical, cortical and prefrontal cortex of anaesthetized rats and awake mouse to an oddball paradigm similar to that used for MMN studies. Our data demonstrate that most neurons in the non-lemnical divisions of the auditory brain show strong SSA and that there is a hierarchical emergence of prediction error signals along the central auditory system.
Taken together our results unify three coexisting views of perceptual deviance detection at different levels of description: neuronal physiology, cognitive neuroscience and the theoretical predictive coding framework. More importantly we can understand how this predictive coding may be hampered in neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, or neuro deneratiev diseaes like Alzheimer disease and how hearing loss may affect this pathological conditions
Bio:
Manuel S. Malmierca, MD, PhD, received his MD (1988) at the University of Salamanca and his PhD (1991) in the neuroanatomy in collaboration at the Anatomical Institute of the University of Oslo (Norway). From 1991-1994, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne where he trained in neurophysiology. In 1994, he was awarded a Human Capital and Mobility Fellowship (Currently MCSA program) from the EU and returned to the University of Salamanca. He has had faculty appointments at the University of Salamanca as an Assistant Professor (1996-1999) and Associate Professor (1999-2016), and he was appointed Professor in 2016.
Currently, he is also the director of the Institute of Neuroscience of Castilla y León (INCYL) at the University of Salamanca, and he holds a faculty appointment as adjunct assistant professor at the University of Connecticut in the USA.
Dr. Malmierca has been continuously funded since 2000 as a PI by different research agencies including the Spanish Research Council, the Regional Government of Junta de Castilla y León, the ERA-Net Neuron Program, and the ITN-MSCA-programs from the EU, Fundación Ramón Aréces, etc.
In the area of research, Prof. Malmierca has published more than 100 scientific documents including book chapters and scientific articles in prestigious journals such as Nature Communications, J. Neuroscience and Plos Biology.
https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=PU2FthsAAAAJ&hl=es&oi=ao
His primary research interest is the structure and function of the auditory brain. Over the last 20 years, he has focused on the neurophysiological mechanisms that govern neuronal adaptation and the relationship between stimulus-specific adaptation and mismatch negativity and more recently predictive coding.
He is an editor and serves as a member of the editorial board in several journals in the field of neuroscience. Dr. Malmierca has been an invited speaker in more than 100 seminars or symposiums all over the world. He has served as, and continues doing so, reviewer for many high-profiles journal in the field of Neuroscience (Including Neuron, PNAS, Nature Communications, J. Neuroscience, Neuroimage, etc.) and also National and International Research Agencies from Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Hong Kong, Chile, France, etc.
In the area of education, Dr. Malmierca has been the chair for the Master program in Neuroscience for 8 years and the PhD program in Neuroscience for 9 years. He has supervised the successful completion of 15 PhD thesis over the past 20 years. Of these, 6 theses have been awarded as the best thesis at the Medical School, and 7 theses have also achieved the grade of Doctor Europeus or Doctor International. Currently, Dr. Malmierca is supervising 4 Ph.D. theses that will be completed in the next couple of years. His laboratory was a part of an ERASMUS MUNDUS students exchange program in auditory cognitive neuroscience and is now involved in another educational project BRAINTWIN funded by the EU to promote the research collaboration in the field of Neuroengineering
Dr. Malmierca is also the Co-Director of the Neuroscience in Salamanca Spain study abroad program (https://health.uconn.edu/neuroscience-abroad/) that is held every spring at the Institute of Neuroscience in Salamanca and in cooperation with the University of Connecticut and John Hopkins Universities. This well-established, 5-week program is in its 12nd year and attracts 40-50 students from USA and overseas. It includes a course on the Neurobiology of Hearing (https://health.uconn.edu/meds5377/) devoted to the study of the auditory brain. This course is taught by Dr. Malmierca and outstanding visiting faculty from all over the world in addition to the faculty from Salamanca, Connecticut, and John Hopkins.