RESOURCES
For many years now, we’ve been sharing useful resources and media stories related to our research projects. As a leading Science Laboratory in the San Francisco area, it’s important for us to engage with the community and keep them informed about the incredible work and developments they’re helping to support.
RESOURCES
For many years now, we’ve been sharing useful resources and media stories related to our research projects. As a leading Science Laboratory in the San Francisco area, it’s important for us to engage with the community and keep them informed about the incredible work and developments they’re helping to support.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
The research in our lab spans across a wide range of areas to better understand how sounds are encoded in sensory systems, how cognitive processes support listening under challenges, and how sensation and cognition interact to shape listening experiences in younger and older adulthood. Here you will find a selection of specific research projects we conducted in the lab.
2023: International Journal of Speech Technology
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) lead to an increasing number of encounters with computer-generated (AI) speech: smart homes and phones, automated phone services, train announcements, and grocery self-checkouts. In this work, we investigate how younger and older adults perceive AI speech.
2022: Scientific Reports
Background sounds in crowded places like a restaurant typically fluctuate in intensity. Such fluctuations can help us understand speech, because they enable us to perceive glimpses of speech when the intensity of the background sound is low. We investigate whether younger and older adults differ in their benefit from such speech glimpses.
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2020: Trends in Hearing
Positive listening experiences, such as enjoyment or feeling absorbed/immersed in what is said, are not commonly studied despite their potential importance in motivating effortful listening. We use engaging spoken stories to investigate how positive listening experiences are affected by speech masking.
2018: The Journal of Neuroscience
Aging and hearing loss lead to increased neural responses to sounds in the auditory cortex. Enhanced neural activity to sound may be a physiological mechanism underlying the difficulty that older adults have with ignoring irrelevant sound information.
2018: Journal of Experimental Psychology: HPP
Acoustic features such as modulation rate, sound level, and frequency co-vary in speech and music. A listener perceives sounds as changing in one feature when the sound changes in another feature. When a listener is not optimally attentive, they rely strongly on featural co-variations for perception.
2013: Journal of Neurophysiology
Everyday sound environments, such as a crowded restaurant, continuously change. Neural activity in auditory cortex flexibly adapts to spectral properties (here variance) of sound environments, providing a potentially crucial mechanism to optimize perception.
