Mai Jessica, Gargiullo Rowan, Zheng Megan, Esho Valentina, Hussein Osama E, Pollay Eliana, Bowe Cedric, Williamson Lucas M, McElroy Abigail F, Goolsby William N, Brooks Kaitlyn A, Rodgers Chris C
Department of Neurosurgery, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta GA 30322.
Neuroscience Graduate Program, Emory University, Atlanta GA 30322.
bioRxiv. 2024 Jan 9:2024.01.08.574475. doi: 10.1101/2024.01.08.574475.
How we move our bodies affects how we perceive sound. For instance, we can explore an environment to seek out the source of a sound and we can use head movements to compensate for hearing loss. How we do this is not well understood because many auditory experiments are designed to limit head and body movements. To study the role of movement in hearing, we developed a behavioral task called sound-seeking that rewarded mice for tracking down an ongoing sound source. Over the course of learning, mice more efficiently navigated to the sound. We then asked how auditory behavior was affected by hearing loss induced by surgical removal of the malleus from the middle ear. An innate behavior, the auditory startle response, was abolished by bilateral hearing loss and unaffected by unilateral hearing loss. Similarly, performance on the sound-seeking task drastically declined after bilateral hearing loss and did not recover. In striking contrast, mice with unilateral hearing loss were only transiently impaired on sound-seeking; over a recovery period of about a week, they regained high levels of performance, increasingly reliant on a different spatial sampling strategy. Thus, even in the face of permanent unilateral damage to the peripheral auditory system, mice recover their ability to perform a naturalistic sound-seeking task. This paradigm provides an opportunity to examine how body movement enables better hearing and resilient adaptation to sensory deprivation.
我们身体的运动方式会影响我们对声音的感知。例如,我们可以探索周围环境以找出声音的来源,还可以通过头部运动来弥补听力损失。我们对这些行为的具体机制了解尚浅,因为许多听觉实验旨在限制头部和身体的运动。为了研究运动在听力中的作用,我们开发了一种名为声音寻找的行为任务,该任务奖励小鼠追踪持续的声源。在学习过程中,小鼠能更高效地导航到声音处。然后,我们探究了通过手术切除中耳锤骨所导致的听力损失如何影响听觉行为。一种先天行为——听觉惊吓反应,在双侧听力损失后消失,而单侧听力损失对其没有影响。同样,双侧听力损失后,声音寻找任务的表现大幅下降且无法恢复。与之形成鲜明对比的是,单侧听力损失的小鼠在声音寻找任务中仅出现短暂的受损;在大约一周的恢复期后,它们恢复了高水平的表现,越来越依赖于一种不同的空间采样策略。因此,即使外周听觉系统遭受永久性单侧损伤,小鼠仍能恢复执行自然主义声音寻找任务的能力。这种范式为研究身体运动如何促进更好的听力以及对感觉剥夺的弹性适应提供了契机。