LSRI: Auditory perception, learning and habilitation

Daniel Shub
University of Nottingham

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 increased for individuals with hearing impairments. Hearing loss distorts speech and likely increases the cognitive resources required for communicating.
This is a major problem because cognitive resources devoted to communicating cannot be used for other things (e.g., hearing-impaired children may devote more cognitive resources to understanding the teacher and therefore less cognitive resources to learning than normal-hearing children). There are a number of potential ways to compensate for the adverse effects of hearing loss. One of the most obvious ways is to change the acoustics (e.g., through hearing aid amplification and noise reduction). Another way, which could be used in conjunction with acoustic strategies, is to capitalize on our tremendous capacity to learn. This talk will focus on a training based intervention that is being designed to promote auditory perceptual learning as a means of reducing the cognitive burdens that arise from hearing impairments.

This event will be live streamed via http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/live/

This seminar will take place in Room 35a, Flexible Learning Room, LSRI, The Exchange, Jubilee Campus