Past Events Category: Brains and Bagels

Erik Jorgensen, Au.D, Ph.D., CCC-A
Waisman Center
January 23, 2026 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Hearing loss is robustly associated with increased risks of loneliness and depression. The mechanisms underlying this association are unknown. Whether interventions such as hearing aids reduce risk of negative psychosocial health outcomes is equivocal, but the research is limited. In this talk, we outline a possible hearing-related behavior framework for understanding how hearing loss may lead to negative psychosocial health outcomes. Rooted in auditory ecology, we posit that hearing loss leads to negative psychosocial health outcomes due to mismatches between perceptual abilities and auditory demands of listeners, such that hearing loss differentially effects psychosocial health dependent on soundscapes listeners experience. We then provide empirical evidence testing this theory. Our results provide support for our hypothesized pathway from hearing loss to depression; however, the results also suggest that hearing aid use may change daily life behaviors in fundamental ways that call into question traditional philosophies of hearing aid benefit and outcome.

Aditi Gargeshwari, PhD
Waisman Center
December 12, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Processing of Binaural Cues: Psychophysical and Neural Perspectives

Lisette LeMerise
Waisman Center
December 5, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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Assessing Auditory Cortical Region Differences Between Individuals with Down Syndrome and Healthy Controls with Quantitative Neuroimaging

Yuyu Zeng (Rustle), Ph.D.
Waisman Center
November 21, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
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Speech sensorimotor adaptation—adjusting articulation to counter altered auditory feedback—unfolds in a predictable direction. This talk demonstrates how that property can be leveraged to improve second-language vowel learning. Native Spanish speakers produced English /ɪ/ (“ship”) under altered auditory feedback that shifted perceived feedback toward or away from /i/ (“sheep”). Both groups adapted as expected, but only the toward-/i/ group produced more clearly differentiated vowels after the feedback was removed. Perceptual identification of the /i/–/ɪ/ contrast also became sharper across groups. These results show that leveraging the predictable direction of sensorimotor adaptation can refine non-native vowel production and perception.

Christian Stilp, PhD
Waisman Center
November 7, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Objects and events in the sensory environment are never perceived in isolation, but relative to surrounding stimuli. This is especially true in speech perception, where acoustic characteristics of surrounding sounds have powerful contextual influences on perception of speech sounds. In this talk, I will discuss two classic effects of surrounding spectral context on auditory perception: spectral contrast effects and auditory enhancement effects. I will show that speech sound categorization is exquisitely sensitive to both of these effects, which are related to each other at the individual differences level. I will review the neural mechanisms thought to underlie these effects and introduce data that seek to clarify where these effects occur in the auditory system. Finally, I will examine how these context effects shape speech perception for listeners with hearing impairment, investigating their interrelationship at the individual differences level as well. Together, this work points to promising future directions that may ultimately improve speech-perception-in-context by listeners with impaired hearing.

Kevin Sitek, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 31, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

The central auditory system is comprised of a number of subcortical and cortical brain structures. While non-invasive methods like MRI and EEG have enabled detailed study of the human auditory cortex, imaging the deep, small subcortical auditory nuclei remains challenging. Fortunately, advances in non-invasive imaging are facilitating research into the entire human auditory system and how it's involved in critical behaviors like speech communication. In this talk I’ll present my contributions to human auditory neuroimaging, including publicly available anatomical atlases of the subcortical auditory structures, their function, and the connectivity of the auditory pathway. I’ll then discuss recent work using these methods to probe auditory–striatal connectivity and its role in sound category learning. Finally, I’ll show how the EEG frequency-following response can provide insights into auditory–motor integration, with implications for speech production and feedback processing. Overall, this research advances our understanding of the human auditory system as a distributed network supporting complex behaviors, highlighting the value of multimodal neuroimaging in bridging brain structure and function.

Xin Huang​, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 24, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Natural scenes are often complex and contain multiple entities. Visual segmentation refers to the processes of partitioning visual scenes into distinct objects and surfaces, as well as segregating figural objects from their background. Segmentation is crucial for scene interpretation, object recognition, and visually guided action. However, it is still unclear how the brain represents and segregates multiple stimuli. We hypothesize that the visual system exploits statistical regularities in natural scenes to represent multiple stimuli and facilitate segmentation. To test this hypothesis, we characterized natural scene statistics of motion and depth pertinent to visual segmentation, as these cues are potent for segmentation. We found that the figural region tended to move faster and more coherently and tended to be nearer in depth than the background region. In neurophysiological experiments, we recorded the activities of neurons in cortical area MT, a crucial hub for processing visual motion and depth information. We found that the responses of MT neurons to multiple stimuli within their receptive fields tended to be biased toward the stimulus component that moved at a faster speed, more coherently, and at a nearer depth. Previous theoretical studies suggest that mixing multiple stimuli with different weights (rather than equal weights) can enhance the ability to encode multiple stimuli in neuronal populations. Our neural results revealed that MT neurons indeed incorporate this strategy, but in an interesting way: the response biases and hence the response weights for different stimuli reflect optimization for performing behavioral tasks such as figure-ground segregation, given our measured natural scene statistics related to the figure and ground regions. Together, these results enrich our understanding of neural representation and segregation of multiple visual stimuli, as well as demonstrate that neural coding can be optimized to perform essential behavioral tasks, in contrast to preserving information and efficiently using resources.

Karen B. Schloss, PhD
Waisman Center
October 17, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Visual communication is fundamental to how humans share information, from weather patterns to disease prevalence, to their latest scientific discoveries. When people attempt to interpret information visualizations, such as graphs, maps, diagrams, and signage, they are faced with the task of ascribing meaning to perceptual features—perceptual semantics. Sometimes, visualization designs include legends, labels, or captions to help determine perceptual semantics in the context of the visualization. However, people have expectations about how perceptual features will map to concepts called inferred mappings, and they find it more difficult to interpret visualizations that violate those expectations. Traditionally, studies on inferred mappings distinguished factors relevant for visualizations of categorical vs. continuous information. In this talk, I will discuss recent work that unites these two domains within a single framework of assignment inference. Assignment inference is the process by which people infer mappings between perceptual features and concepts represented in encoding systems. I will begin by presenting evidence that observers infer globally optimal assignments by maximizing the “merit,” or “goodness,” of assignments between perceptual features and concepts, with an emphasis on color semantics. I will then discuss factors that contribute to merit in assignment inference and explain how we can model the combination of multiple (sometimes competing) sources of merit to predict human judgments. This work has increased our understanding of how people ascribe meaning to perceptual features, which can be used to make visual communication more effective and efficient.

Doug Dean III, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 10, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

Brain Imaging from Birth and Beyond: Using MRI to Examine Child Development

G. Nike Gnanateja, Ph.D.
Waisman Center
October 3, 2025 @ 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Learn more about the Hearing and Donuts Seminar Series

This talk will explore the use of naturalistic/continuous speech paradigms in understanding speech, language, and hearing processes. Unlike traditional isolated word or sentence tasks, continuous speech provides a more ecologically valid approach to studying how humans process spoken language. I will discuss how this methodology reveals the dynamic interplay between acoustic, linguistic, and cognitive processes during real-world communication. Recent advances in neuroimaging and computational techniques have enabled researchers to track neural responses to continuous speech with high temporal precision. This has led to new insights into how the brain segments and integrates information across multiple timescales, from phonemes to discourse-level structures. I will present evidence showing how continuous speech paradigms have enhanced our understanding of speech perception in both normal-hearing listeners and clinical populations. I will highlight specific applications in 1) hearing loss, 2) studying auditory and language development , and 3) acquired language disorders. I will conclude by discussing future directions and methodological considerations for implementing continuous speech paradigms in research and clinical settings. This approach promises to bridge the gap between laboratory findings and real-world speech processing.