UC Davis

Understanding speech in noisy environments requires more than good hearing. Everyday acoustic scenes are complex and dynamic – far more than most laboratory or clinical settings – thus they extract a heavy cognitive toll. For instance, when following a conversation, we must exert sustained effort while continually switching attention among different talkers. However, despite the tremendous importance of these mechanisms for developing hearing interventions, we know relatively little about them. The following research has three primary aims: to design, build, and test a new class of attentional prosthetic platform as a potential aid to those with hearing loss; to characterize brain signals (EEG) that predict and track the locus of selective spatial attention during conversational turn taking; and to demonstrate the functional relationships between selective attention and listening effort that robustly signal listener fatigue.