The auditory perception uses psychoacoustics (the science connecting sound and hearing) to evaluate mechanisms responsible for perception of listeners with good hearing, hearing loss, and tinnitus.

The first goal of the auditory perception lab is to establish how hearing loss influences auditory perception, with an emphasis toward evaluating and improving assistive technologies. Recent experiments have focused on models of cochlear processing to further our understanding of masking data in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Our spectral-shape discrimination and identification experiments are used to elucidate decision processes used by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners for the perception of complex sounds. As with the masking experiments, we apply cochlear and psychophysical models to further our understanding of the underlying auditory processing. We also use these types of experiments in sound-segregation paradigms in an effort to explore central auditory processes.

The second goal of the lab is to establish better tools to assess and characterize tinnitus, or “ringing” in the ear in the absence of sound. We use psychoacoustical techniques, in which we present sounds and noises to research subjects and ask them questions about those sounds. We have begun evaluating the validity of clinical and research tools that are used to assess tinnitus and are working toward better measurement techniques that could be implements in a clinical setting.