ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The brain's machinery has evolved over millions of years with the specific goal of enabling animals to survive and thrive in an ever-changing environment. To do so, the brain has to solve many information-processing problems in a highly efficient manner. It has to gather, select and process large amounts of sensory information. It must also adapt and motivate organisms to behave within a socioemotionally appropriate context, namely, to feed, to reproduce and care for offspring. Therefore, it must exhibit plasticity at the molecular, cellular and connectional levels and engage in making decisions with important consequences over the short and long term. These decisions are made by integrating incoming sensory information with internal inputs and states via learning, memory and recall, requiring modulation of information via threat detection ("fear") and "reward" circuits. The mechanisms by which these circuits operate is not entirely clear. My group and I are deeply interested in understanding the brain's design principles, especially for processing auditory information, auditory learning, goal-directed behaviors and decision-making. We use a comparative approach to tackle some of these questions.

We are studying audiovocal social communication in bats, auditory learning in zebrafish and mechanisms for coping with distress in humans. We use a variety of techniques, including electrophysiology, immunocytochemistry, neuroanatomy, eye-tracking, imaging, computational modeling and advanced statistical analyses to study the brain and behavior in these organisms. The present focus is on conducting behavioral studies to explore auditory discrimination and memory in zebrafish, which are model organisms, allowing the use of genetic tools to edit the brain and observe its effects on neural circuits and behavior. These studies will allow us to better understand the mechanisms and origins of speech sound perception in humans and it's disruption within a social context, as in the case of autism spectrum disorders. We have recently devised a completely automated behavioral assay for conducting some of the studies.

DR. KANWAL'S PUBLICATIONS

1. Kanwal J.S., A. Lin, and J. Feng (2022) Geographic variation in social vocalizations of the Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bat, Hipposideros armiger: acoustic diversity is unconstrained by population boundaries Frontiers in Ecology (by invitation).

2. Lin, A., Feng, J. and Kanwal, J.S., (2022) Geographic Variation in Social Vocalizations of the Great Himalayan Leaf-Nosed Bat, Hipposideros armiger: Acoustic Overflow Across Population Boundaries. FRONTIERS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, 10.

3. Singh, B.J.; Zu, L.; Summers, J.; Asdjodi, S.; Glasgow, E.; Kanwal, J.S. (2023) NemoTrainer: Automated Conditioning for Stimulus-Directed Navigation and Decision Making in Free-Swimming Zebrafish. Animals, 13, 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13010116. (accepted, 2022).

4. Jiang T, Guo X, Lin A, Wu H, Sun C, Feng J, Kanwal JS. Bats increase vocal amplitude and decrease vocal complexity to mitigate noise interference during social communication. Anim Cogn 99: 1–16, 2019. 

5. Jiang, T., Guo, X., Lin, A., Wu, H., Sun, C., Feng, J., & Kanwal, J. S. (2019). Bats increase vocal amplitude and decrease vocal complexity to mitigate noise interference during social communication. Animal Cognition, 99, 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-018-01235-0 Am. 140, 3765; http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4966286

6. Kanwal, J.S. (2020) Sonic and Ultrasonic Communication in Bats: acoustics, perception and production. Invited book chapter (peer-reviewed), In: Hoffman F. (ed.), Neuroendocrine Regulation of Vocalizations; Elsevier, 2020. 

7. Washington, S. D., Hamaide, J., Jeurissen, B., van Steenkiste, G., Huysmans, T., Sijbers, Kanwal, J.S. et al. (2018). A three-dimensional digital neurological atlas of the mustached bat (Pteronotus parnellii). NeuroImage, 183, 300–313. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.08.013

8. Sun, C., Sun, C., Jiang, T., Kanwal, J.S., Guo, X., Luo, B., et al. (2018). Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats modify vocalizations to communicate threat escalation during agonistic interactions. Behavioural Processes, 157, 180–187. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.09.013

9. Washington S.D. and Kanwal J.S. (2012) Sex-dependent hemispheric asymmetries for processing frequency modulations in the primary auditory cortex of the mustached bat. J. Neurophysiol (in review).

10. Kanwal J.S. (2012) Right-left asymmetry in the cortical processing of sounds for social communication vs navigation in mustached bats. Eu. J. Neurosci. 35: 257-270; doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2011.07951.

11. Naumann, R.T. and Kanwal J.S. (2011) The basolateral amygdala responds robustly to social calls: spiking characteristics of single unit activity. J. Neurophysiol. 105:2389-2404.

12. Wang, J. Kanwal J.S., Zhang, C., Jiang. T. Lu, G. and Feng, J. (2010) Seasonal habitat use by greater horseshoe bat Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (Chiroptera: Rhinolophidae) in Changbai Mountain temperate forest, Northeast China. Mammalia 74:257–266.

13. Ma, J., Naumann, R.T. and Kanwal J.S. (2010) Fear conditioned discrimination of frequency modulated sweeps within species-specific calls of mustached bats. PLoS ONE, 5:1-12. e10579.

14. Kanwal J.S. (2009) Animal Communication: Taxonomic Groups: Audiovocal communication in bats (ms # 1839) NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NEUROSCIENCE, ELSEVIER. Vol.1, pp. 681-690.

15. Kanwal J.S. (2006) A distributed cortical representation of social calls. In: J.S. Kanwal and G. Ehret, (eds.) BEHAVIOR AND NEURODYNAMICS FOR AUDITORY COMMUNICATION, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge England, pp. 156-188.

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