William Hall

Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, College Park

Email: williamshall@rcn.com

During his career, Professor Hall has made contributions to two different but related fields in Psychological Science, developmental psycholinguistics and comparative neuroscience. His work in recent years in comparative neuroscience addressed a fundamental issue in Psychology and Biology: How do individuals who learn their communication sounds use the information in auditory stimuli to provide feedback for vocal learning? Using a small parrot (the Budgerigar) as a model system, he explored this question by mapping brain pathways interconnecting the auditory system with vocal control areas and other brain areas, employed the method of lesioning of putative pathways needed for providing auditory feedback to test hypotheses concerning the role of these pathways and, most recently used gene expression techniques to evaluate the responsiveness of neurons in the brain to species-typical sounds and other sounds.

Courtesy of: University of Maryland, Department of Psychology

Selected Publications

 


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