Each year, graduating psychology undergraduates are tasked with completing a project to explore an area of interest. The Sharon Borine Top Capstone Award acknowledges students whose senior projects were of the highest quality.
This spring semester, Tyler Schildt was awarded the 1st place capstone award for the paper titled “Evaluating Effects of Limited Dynamic Range and Frequency-to-Place Mismatch in Simulations of Electric Hearing.” Schildt receives a $250 cash award.
Tyler has always had an interest in the sensory systems of the human body and how these systems impact our lives. He grew up with an older sister with a profound sensorineural hearing loss, so was exposed to the tremendous impact that sensory input, or lack thereof, can have on a person's life. This experience, along with an interest in human physiology and sensory systems, was what drove him to pursue a position in the Auditory Perception and Cognition (APC) Laboratory under Dr. Andrew Oxenham as an undergraduate research assistant. Tyler is a Pre-Physical Therapy student and plans to attend a physical therapy program starting in the Fall of 2022. He believes a background in psychology will be a strong foundation for a healthcare career and will help him to understand and connect with patients.
Tyler’s work in the APC lab was primarily focused on a project involving the simulation of electric hearing (a cochlear implant, or CI) using a vocoder (digital simulation of CI), and then presenting this simulation to individuals with clinically normal hearing to assess their performance in comparison to CI users on several tasks. The end goal of this work is to improve the vocoder simulations that we use to assess and understand the experience of CI users, to hopefully improve the auditory experience of these individuals. He worked directly under Dr. Jordan Beim on this project.