Dynamic processes in spatial hearing: Experiments, modeling, and analytical tools

Duration: 01/2016 – 12/2018.
Grant number: 1/1011/16.

Project summary:

In everyday situations, humans are exposed to multiple concurrent stimuli in complex, continuously changing environments. To correctly extract relevant information, they dynamically adapt their processing to reflect the specifics of the current scene, and they learn from previous experience to improve the perceptual strategies used. The current project proposes to perform a series of behavioral experiments, brain imaging studies, and computational modeling 1) to study the auditory mechanisms of adaptation to new reverberant environments for speech processing, sound localization, and learning of new phonetic categories, and 2) to study how attention and mechanisms of implicit and explicit learning are used to cope with complex listening environments. The results will be important, e.g., for development of new prosthetic devices and new virtual reality technologies. Here, they will be used to develop a brain training game that can improve impaired listeners’ performance in complex environments.