Speaker: Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Abstract:
Imagine yourself at a rollicking party. One of the wonderful feats of auditory perception is that if you find yourself in dull conversation about, say, motor homes, you can satisfy social expectations while really listening to the racy gossip about your colleague coming from your left. This real-life example illustrates the importance of auditory attention in allowing us to communicate in noisy settings. Early psychoacoustic work focused on understanding how you process a message when there is only one source demanding your attention, such as in a phone conversation or when listening to speech in a background of steady-state noise. However, that is not how you operate when you navigate a busy street or argue some controversial issue at a faculty meeting. The perceptual ability to focus auditory attention, which varies greatly even amongst “normal-hearing" listeners, depends not only on cortical circuitry that directs volitional attention, but also on the fidelity of the subcortical sensory coding of sound. Results from behavioral tests illustrate how different spectro-temporal sound features influence the ability to segregate and select a target sound from an acoustic mixture, while neuroimaging results reveal the power of top-down attention in modulating the neural representation of the acoustic scene.

Speaker Bio:
Barbara Shinn-Cunningham trained as an electrical engineer (Brown University, Sc.B.; MIT, M.S. and Ph.D.). She is the Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet), a Boston University research center uniting more than 40 faculty members across three colleges. Her research on attention, auditory perception, and spatial hearing has lead to recognition from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows program, as well as support from NIDCD, NSF, ONR, AFOSR, and other agencies. Within Boston University, she is Director and PI of the NSF-sponsored CELEST Science of Learning Center. Active in many professional societies, she currently is serving as Vice-President-Elect of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and has served as Chair of the AUD NIH study section, Member of Executive Council of the ASA and as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Associate for Research in Otolaryngology. She is a Fellow of the ASA, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers, and a lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council "in recognition of extraordinary service to the National Academies in its role as advisor to the Nation in matters of science." She oversees an active research group that uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand auditory attention, a topic on which she lectures at conferences and symposia around the world.