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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 12, 2006, 26(28):7477-7490; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1563-06.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Sparse Representations for the Cocktail Party Problem

Hiroki Asari,¹ Barak A. Pearlmutter,³ and Anthony M. Zador²

¹Watson School of Biological Sciences, ²Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, and ³Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland

Correspondence should be addressed to Anthony M. Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, One Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724. Email: zador{at}cshl.edu

A striking feature of many sensory processing problems is that there appear to be many more neurons engaged in the internal representations of the signal than in its transduction. For example, humans have 30,000 cochlear neurons, but at least 1000 times as many neurons in the auditory cortex. Such apparently redundant internal representations have sometimes been proposed as necessary to overcome neuronal noise. We instead posit that they directly subserve computations of interest. Here we provide an example of how sparse overcomplete linear representations can directly solve difficult acoustic signal processing problems, using as an example monaural source separation using solely the cues provided by the differential filtering imposed on a source by its path from its origin to the cochlea [the head-related transfer function (HRTF)]. In contrast to much previous work, the HRTF is used here to separate auditory streams rather than to localize them in space. The experimentally testable predictions that arise from this model, including a novel method for estimating the optimal stimulus of a neuron using data from a multineuron recording experiment, are generic and apply to a wide range of sensory computations.

Key words: auditory processing; optimality; receptive field; sparse coding; stream segregation; cortical representation

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Received Nov. 23, 2005; revised May 30, 2006; accepted June 2, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Anthony M. Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, One Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724. Email: zador{at}cshl.edu

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