The school year is approaching and I’m back at Vassar (my office will be temporarily moved for the fall 2014 semester, so you can find me in Blodgett 234). This summer I was down in Atlanta, working out of my collaborator, Walt Wilczynski’s lab. Walt and I have previously shown that listening to a chorus can enhance midbrain responses to a conspecific (same-species) call in green treefrogs. This summer I took my eletrophysiology equipment to Atlanta to explore whether the changes in the brain might be due to more generalized changes in peripheral auditory processing (the ear and the auditory nerve). To explore this we measured several aspects of hearing. Then we housed frog in individual chambers, where we could play either a conspecific chorus or random tones for 10 days. After those 10 days we measured the hearing of the animals again. What happened? Stayed tuned for updates as the data gets analyzed! Below you can see pictures of our experimental set-up.
These individual sound chambers house the frogs.
This is what it looks like inside of the sound chamber.
One of our frogs, enjoying a sound chamber.
This is the computer and hardware we use for our experiments. The beige box is a large walk-in sound attenuating chamber.
Inside the sound attenuation chamber. The animal is placed in the faraday cage below the speaker.
This is a research lab that we used at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
so, is that your office?