Overview
The Hearing Research Lab aims to understand the complex process of listening in noisy environments and then to use this understanding to improve speech perception by people with hearing loss. As listeners, we have to pull apart the sound we are interested in ("the target sound") from the competing sounds in the environment. We process sounds in our auditory system and then use higher-level brain proccesses to decode the spoken message. For people with hearing loss, the process becomes more complicated with the effects of hearing aid technology and the effects of hearing loss added to the mix. And older adults may also have age-related changes in cognition (e.g., changes in working memory) that may affect the listening process. The research projects in our lab each addresses one or more of these pieces of the listening chain.