Computational auditory models in hearing research: from diagnostics to sound perception

In the past decades, auditory models have been very successful in connecting the physiology of hearing to its functionality. Models were pivotal in understanding differences between normal and hearing-impaired sound processing and have thereby inspired numerous hearing prosthetic algorithms. Because auditory models come in different flavors (fast, computational, functional, nonlinear or biophysical), it is important to be aware of their respective limitations for your study or application.

What Art can tell us about the Brain

Artists have been doing experiments on vision longer than neurobiologists. Some major works of art have provided insights as to how we see; some of these insights are so fundamental that they can be understood in terms of the underlying neurobiology.  For example, artists have long realized that color and luminance can play independent roles in visual perception.

The Language of Life: exploring the origins of human communication

Language is the most powerful social tool any species has evolved - we can use it to share any idea we can think of with the minds of those around us: from poetry, Shakespeare, and physics, to internet memes it underpins what defines us as a species. But despite centuries of thought and study we still have very little idea of how and why language evolved. As a field primatologist at the University of St Andrews, I have spent 15 years living and working with wild apes in the rainforests and mountains of Uganda.

What is listening effort?

When speech is heard in the presence of background sound, or when hearing is impaired, the sensory information at the ear is often too ambiguous to support speech recognition by itself. In such circumstances, knowledge-guided processes that help to interpret and repair the degraded signal are required. Such recruitment of cognitive processes is probably why listening in noise “feels” effortful, even when intelligibility is high. Such effort can be aversive, and the goal of making listening less effortful is increasingly recognized as important.