Modeling the Detection of Tones in Reproducible Noise
The phenomenon that subjects with normal hearing can easily understand speech in noisy background while those with hearing loss (even with the help of hearing aids) perform poorly has been studied for decades. Yet it is still not clear how subjects detect even pure tones. The goal of this project is to find the underlying mechanisms that can explain subjects' detection results in a tone-in-noise detection task using reproducible (frozen
) noise maskers. Different cues have been used independently to solve this problem; however, none of them has been able to fully account for the results. We have tried to combine these cues based on their individual effectiveness
, which could be obtained from their posterior probabilities given tone presence. Furthermore, we seek to analyze detection using auditory-nerve models, as well as models for brainstem neurons.
Correlation between subjects' detection results and single cues or the combined cue.
Researcher: Laurel H. Carney, Ph.D.
Auditory Neuroscience; neurophysiological, behavioral, and computational studies of hearing; signal processing for hearing aids.