Tony Zador, MD, PhD

My laboratory uses a combination of physiological, molecular, behavioral and computational approaches to study neural coding in the auditory cortex. My goal is to understand the mechanisms underlying the neural correlates of auditory processing, attention and decision making. Understanding these processed may help development treatments for cognitive disorders. I am particularly interested in autism.

I have been at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1999, and I am now Professor of Biology and Program Chair in Neuroscience here. My pedigree includes graduate work with Christof Koch (Caltech) and Tom Brown (Yale), and a postdoc with Chuck Stevens (Salk Institute). I have published some papers and helped to organize some events. I am a co-founder of the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) meeting.

Recent publications

Auditory Cortex: From Synapses to Behavior

Research Overview

We use a variety of physiological, molecular and computational approaches to study how the auditory cortex processes sound, and how it allows us to focus on one sound whilst ignoring the rest (aka the cocktail party problem). The long-term goal of my laboratory is to elucidate the cortical mechanisms underlying attention in the rodent auditory cortex. Solving this problem may ultimately provide insight into the "Big C" (consciousness).

Psychologists have studied cognition for over a century, but lacking the tools to peer into the "black box" of neural circuitry their explanations have remained purely phenomenological. It has long been known that single neurons in the auditory cortex can be strongly modulated by attention (e.g. Hubel et al, 1959 and Hocherman et al, 1976 ). These observations represented an important step forward, because they converted a psychological question ("How do behavioral responses arise from stimuli?") into a neuroscientific one ("How does neural circuitry mediate the transformation of stimuli to responses?"). After this promising early start, however, most of the subsequent work on attention has been in humans and nonhuman primates. I believe that the basic cortical mechanisms subserving attention are likely to be similar across species, and that questions about neural mechanism are best studied in the simplest preparation possible--rodents--which I think are simple enough, but not too simple.

Research in the lab is organized around three main questions:

What are the neural representations of sound in the auditory cortex, and how are these representations modulated by non-sensory input, such as attention and reward?
What are the cellular and synaptic mechanisms underlying these sensory representations and their non-sensory modulation?
What are the mechanisms by which learning modifies these representations?

We use a variety of techniques and preparations, including:

Whole cell and cell-attached recording in the anesthetized rodent;
Whole cell and cell-attached recording in the awake (head-fixed) rodent;
Tetrode recording for recording neural populations in the freely moving, behaving rat;
Molecular approaches to monitor and perturb neural activity;
Computational approaches to analyze neural coding.