Problems communicating in everyday settings: cortical control to hidden hearing loss: Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, PhD

Abstract:

In a crowded setting, selective auditory attention is what allows you to tune out boring, unimportant sounds and focus on what interests you. This focus of selective auditory attention enhances the neural representation of the attended source and suppresses the representation of competing sources. While many listeners can direct selective auditory attention effortlessly, listeners with hearing impairment often have difficulty. This makes sense, given that directing selective attention depends on being able to perceptually separate the acoustic scene into constituent sources; this, in turn, depends on the use of fine spectro-temporal sound features (e.g., harmonicity, interaural differences, common modulation, etc.) that may not be well represented in the impaired system. Recent studies in my lab and others show that even individuals with normal hearing thresholds can differ enormously in their ability to focus selective attention. We believe that some of these individual differences reflect differences in the fidelity with which supra-threshold sound is represented in the brainstem, even though detection thresholds are normal. Here, I will present data exploring the relationship between how well listeners can communicate in everyday settings and how well supra-threshold sound is encoded, measured both psychophysically and physiologically.

Bio:

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. She graduated from Brown University in 1986 and earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. She joined the faculty of Boston University in 1997, initially as a member of the now-defunct Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers, and a lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council. She is currently Director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, which promotes interdisciplinary research at Boston University. Her research uses behavioural, neuroimaging and computational methods to study auditory attention, individual differences in hearing ability, crossmodal interactions, and spatial hearing, both in healthy adult populations and in individuals facing various challenges, including hearing loss, autism and blast injury.