RESOURCES
For many years now, we’ve been sharing useful resources and media stories related to our research projects. As a leading Science Laboratory in the San Francisco area, it’s important for us to engage with the community and keep them informed about the incredible work and developments they’re helping to support.
RESOURCES
For many years now, we’ve been sharing useful resources and media stories related to our research projects. As a leading Science Laboratory in the San Francisco area, it’s important for us to engage with the community and keep them informed about the incredible work and developments they’re helping to support.
Auditory Aging
Welcome to the website of the Auditory Aging research lab. We study how people engage in listening and communication as they age. Our research spans from mechanistic neurophysiology to real-world listening experiences.
The lab is led by Dr. Björn Herrmann who is a scientist and Tier II Canada Research Chair at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, in Canada.
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Latest news
April 2025
A recent study from our lab follows up on investigating the sensitivity of eye movements to listening effort during story listening. We show for younger and older adults that eye movements decrease when the level of background noise masking speech increases.
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Mar 2025
Ever wondered about how aging affected the neural processing of naturalistic music? This new work shows that auditory cortex of older adults is hyperresponsive to feature in music, but that this comes at the cost of reduced sensitivity to musical tempo in music.
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Mar 2025
Another new one from the lab. The work shows that large language models can be used to automate the scoring of speech recall across languages. This research opens avenues for more accessible speech-perception assessments.
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Feb 2025
New work out from the lab! We show that event segmentation of story materials and assessment of human story recall can be automated using large language models. This work has implications on how we can do research in story processing and memory.
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Jan 2025
In this new work, we show that background noise increases neural speech tracking in younger but not older adults. But older adults show greater neural speech tracking, suggesting that older adults already have more internal neural noise.​​​​
Lab tour
Watch an introductory tour through our lab.
You will see magneto- and electroencephalography, which we use to record brain activity, and our eye-tracking device, which we use to record eye movements and pupil dilation. We use these tools to learn what happens when we age and speech comprehension becomes effortful, and how we can help older people comprehend speech better.
Participate in our research
If you are interested in our research and would like to take part as a participant in our research studies, please send us an email through our participant registration form.
Get a video lab tour in the section above to learn what techniques we use in our research laboratory. But we also do research beyond the lab environment, where we conduct qualitative interviews to learn about the daily experiences of individuals and potential challenges associated with hearing loss and cognitive decline.
Research opportunities
If you are interested in research opportunities in the area of Auditory Aging, please find more details here. You may also want to read about skills that may help you to be successful in your undergraduate and graduate studies.
Postdoctoral researchers
Post-docs may want to look at the Banting Fellowships, Marie Curie fellowships (Europeans), CIHR Fellowships, NSERC Fellowships, or other lists provided by UofO and JHU.
Graduate students
We often look for people who are interested in our work and who could see themselves as an MSc or PhD student (see our open positions). Please also check out the application information at UofT.
Undergraduate students
Undergraduate students should send Dr. Herrmann a CV, transcript, writing sample, as well as a short description of why they are interested in this area of research and the time commitment they are able to make.
Current and previous funding
We are grateful for the financial support we have received from government, foundation, and private sources to conduct our research. We are committed to making a positive impact in the lives of older people through our research.
Contact
Björn Herrmann
Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest
3560 Bathurst St, North York
M6A 2E1, ON, Canada
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Email: bherrmann@research.baycrest.org
Phone: +1 416 785 2500 ext. 2614