Bobby Gibbs, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Director, Auditory Encoding and Processing Optimization (AEPO) Lab
Discovering the Structure of Auditory Cue Binding During Speech Glimpsing in Electric Hearing
The tracking of coherent changes in acoustic stimulus features known as auditory cue binding is essential to segregating a target talker from noise to improve speech understanding. It is currently unclear how cue binding changes with variation in the fidelity of neural stimulation through a cochlear implant (CI). I argue that this gap in knowledge is a major barrier towards improving signal enhancement strategies in CIs. My lab has recently combined auditory bubbles “glimpsing” paradigms with simulations of idealized vs suboptimal CI neural stimulation to address this knowledge gap. The glimpsing paradigm reveals cues that best support intelligibility when noise is randomly attenuated in different spectral and temporal regions. I will present preliminary research that explores how speech glimpsing is predicted by the utilization of spectrotemporal modulations (important for cue binding) when neural encoding is altered (via vocoder simulations of increased spread of neural excitation). The hypothesis that increased spread of neural excitation changes the structure of cue binding needed for glimpsing speech in noise. I will show how we have tested this hypothesis with behavioral data and objective speech intelligibility metrics during auditory bubbles glimpsing tasks.