How do our senses work together? Our eyes and ears cooperate to help us understand our environment. We frequently perceive visual and auditory stimuli as being bound together is they seem likely to have arisen from a common source. That's why we tend not to notice when the speakers on TV sets or in movie theaters are located beside, and not behind, the screen. Research in Dr. Groh's laboratory is devoted to investigating the question of how the brain coordinates the information arising from the ears and eyes. Dr. Groh's findings challenge the historical view of the brain's sensory processing as being automatic, autonomous, and immune from outside influence. The lab has recently established that neurons in the auditory pathway (inferior colliculus, auditory cortex) alter their responses to sound depending on where the eyes are pointing. This finding suggests that the different sensory pathways meddle in one another's supposedly private affairs, making their respective influences felt even at very early stages of processing. The process of bringing the signals from two different sensory pathways into a common frame of reference begins at a surprisingly early point along the primary sensory pathways.
