Frédéric TheunissenView profile
Professor
Frédéric Theunissen serves as a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads the Theunissen Lab. His research centers on auditory neuroscience, investigating how neural systems process vocal communication in animals and humans through interdisciplinary approaches combining behavioral experiments, neurophysiology, and computational modeling. His work explores the neural computations underlying sound perception, focusing on how auditory systems extract behaviorally relevant features from natural soundscapes. Key research areas include pitch, timbre, and rhythm perception; signal extraction from noise; auditory memory formation; and object recognition. The lab employs diverse methodologies including single-unit recordings in songbirds, ECoG/fMRI in humans, and behavioral tests across species ranging from zebra finches to spotted hyenas. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a consistent trajectory in decoding vocal communication mechanisms across biological systems. His work bridges animal and human studies, demonstrating how neural representations of sound features enable tasks like individual caller recognition (e.g., in bird calls and hyena giggles) and hierarchical speech processing in the human cortex. The research emphasizes the evolutionary and functional links between acoustic signal properties and neural coding strategies. Theunissen Lab operates as a collaborative hub for auditory neuroscience at UC Berkeley, integrating animal behavior, human psychophysics, and computational approaches. The lab's ecosystem spans species-specific communication studies—from canaries and woodpeckers to human speech—aiming to decipher universal principles of auditory perception and the neural basis of meaning extraction in communication sounds.
