Auditory Learning

Difficulties communicating are common in everyday life. It is frustrating when you cannot understand someone at the pub or on a bad mobile phone connection. The education of children is hampered when they cannot understand the teacher because the classroom is noisy. The frequency and severity of these communication difficulties are amplified for individuals with hearing impairments. Auditory assistive devices (e.g., hearing aids or cochlear implants) reduce some of these difficulties. Unfortunately, it can take many months of continuous use before the maximum benefits from the auditory assistive devices are achieved. During this initial familiarization stage, many users grow frustrated with their assistive devices and discontinue using them. The aim of the learning theme is to provide technology and training paradigms to reduce the frequency and severity of communication difficulties. Research projects focus not only on users of auditory assistive devices, but also on hearing impaired individuals that elect not to use an assistive device. The research projects fall into two broad classes. The first class of projects examines the efficacy of training paradigms. The second class of projects examines how training modifies the ways in which individuals use degraded information.

Efficacy of training paradigms

The aim of this class of projects is to provide technology and training paradigms that are suitable for use by individuals outside the laboratory. The efficacy of training paradigms often depends on the degree to which the training paradigms are interactive, immersive, and engaging. Unfortunately, auditory training regimens are typically based on conventional, multiple alternative, forced choice sound discrimination exercises and generally do not consider factors such as 'usability'. Projects are underway to develop novel high tech multimedia based auditory training regimens that incorporate current knowledge about psychology, education, learning, decision making, and cognitive tutoring to provide hearing-impaired individuals a means of reducing communication difficulties. Projects include training regimens based on basic tasks (e.g., discriminating between two frequencies or identifying the location of a sound source), laboratory simulations of everyday listening tasks (e.g., speech intelligibility in “cocktail party” settings), and everyday social settings. The efficacy of training regimens will be compare on the basis of (a) changes in performance, (b) subjective reports of benefits in real environments, (c) compliance with the regimens, and (d) user preferences for the regimens.

Learning to use degraded information

The aim of this class of projects is to provide insight into how individuals use degraded auditory information and switch between different listening strategies. Auditory assistive devices corrupt the interaural cues that are critical for spatial hearing. Users of assistive devices must not only utilize corrupted cues, they must be able to switch between different listening strategies (e.g., aided and unaided) and adapt to changes in the processing of the assistive devices. Experiments in animals (specifically, barn owls), have shown that the ability to use corrupted spatial cues depends on age and for older animals on how rapidly the corruption occurs. Projects are underway to characterize how different hearing aid processing algorithms corrupt interaural cues and effect spatial-hearing abilities of different populations (e.g., young, old, normal-hearing, hearing impaired).