Kevin Sitek
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience·Early-career
Your brain treats a sound you make yourself differently from the same sound arriving from outside. Speaking, clapping or tapping produces predictable sensory consequences that the auditory system largely tunes out, yet it must still flag the moments when what you hear does not match what you expected.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
auditory neuroscience
frequency-following response
inferior colliculus
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Use the frequency-following response, a scalp recording of how faithfully early auditory structures encode a sound, to determine when and where auditory-motor interactions occur during self-generated sounds, subcortically or in primary auditory cortex.
- Test how early auditory processing of self-generated sounds changes when the sound is unexpected, and use fMRI in the same participants to map cortical responses to expected versus unexpected sounds during active and passive listening.
- Compare frequency-following response and cortical fMRI representations directly in the same people to link early and later stages of processing for self-generated and expected sounds.
- Quantify anatomical tissue contrast and structural connectivity separately for the lemniscal and non-lemniscal subdivisions of the human inferior colliculus, a small auditory midbrain hub, using ultra-high field 7T MRI.
- Determine whether new speech sound categories are learned through cortex-driven plasticity or through midbrain feature enhancement, by collecting 7T functional MRI at multiple timepoints during a sound-to-category learning program.
- Apply representational similarity analysis to test whether sound-category information in the frequency-following response follows auditory cortex or inferior colliculus at each stage of learning.
More about the research
How the human hearing system manages both jobs at once, and where along the pathway from ear to cortex it happens, is not well understood. Two projects here use non-invasive brain imaging and electrical recordings to map that pathway, with particular attention to structures deep in the midbrain that have been hard to study in living people.
Why it matters
Mapping how the brain handles self-generated and unexpected sounds speaks to communication disorders such as persistent developmental stuttering, where these processes appear disrupted, and could support diagnosis and tracking of treatment response. Characterizing the human inferior colliculus with 7T MRI could also inform understanding of tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss and guide where auditory midbrain implants are best placed; the imaging methods may transfer to other small, deep brain structures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bharath Chandrasekaran
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether moment-to-moment brain states, driven by noradrenergic, cholinergic and dopaminergic arousal systems, explain individual differences in learning speech sound categories, measured in mice and humans with pupil tracking, neural recordings and behavior.
Emily Allen
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Acquire ultra-high-resolution (~0.35 mm³) 7T MRI anatomical scans of human auditory cortex. Use them to create data-driven maps that match the cortex's underlying cell-layer architecture, rather than relying on the variable Heschl's gyrus landmarks.
Matthew Richardson
University of California-Irvine, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether selective intraneural stimulation of apical (low-frequency) auditory nerve fibers improves cats' behavioral discrimination of temporal pitch compared with a conventional cochlear implant electrode, alongside eFFR scalp recordings.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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