Selected
Projects
The research in our lab spans across a wide range of areas, combining behavioral, neuroimaging, computational, and social approaches to reveal how the aging brain adapts – or fails to adapt – to sensory and cognitive changes. His work tackles a central challenge of aging: preserving communication, connection, and cognitive vitality. Here you will find a selection of specific research projects we have previously conducted in the lab.
2025: Journal of Aging Studies
This project investigates how older adults with vision loss navigate the shift from printed reading to audiobook listening, examining the sensory, emotional, and technological adjustments involved. Through in-depth interviews, it explores how narrative experiences evolve when stories are encountered through sound rather than sight. Read more ...
2023: International Journal of Speech Technology
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) lead to an increasing number of encounters with computer-generated (AI) speech: smart homes and phones, automated phone services, train announcements, and grocery self-checkouts. In this work, we investigate how younger and older adults perceive AI speech. Read more ...
2022: Scientific Reports
Background sounds in crowded places like a restaurant typically fluctuate in intensity. Such fluctuations can help us understand speech, because they enable us to perceive glimpses of speech when the intensity of the background sound is low. We investigate whether younger and older adults differ in their benefit from such speech glimpses. Read more ...
2020: Trends in Hearing
Positive listening experiences, such as enjoyment or feeling absorbed/immersed in what is said, are not commonly studied despite their potential importance in motivating effortful listening. We use engaging spoken stories to investigate how positive listening experiences are affected by speech masking. Read more ...
2018: Journal of Neuroscience
Aging and hearing loss lead to increased neural responses to sounds in the auditory cortex. Enhanced neural activity to sound may be a physiological mechanism underlying the difficulty that older adults have with ignoring irrelevant sound information. Read more ...
2018: Journal of Experimental Psychology: HPP
Acoustic features such as modulation rate, sound level, and frequency co-vary in speech and music. A listener perceives sounds as changing in one feature when the sound changes in another feature. When a listener is not optimally attentive, they rely strongly on featural co-variations for perception. Read more ...
2013: Journal of Neurophysiology
Everyday sound environments, such as a crowded restaurant, continuously change. Neural activity in auditory cortex flexibly adapts to spectral properties (here variance) of sound environments, providing a potentially crucial mechanism to optimize perception. Read more ...
