Whiteford Receives NIH National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant

Kelly Whiteford, PhD, research associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, received funding of $581,250 from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) for her study, “Neural and Perceptual Mechanisms for Coding Frequency Modulation.”

An Interview with Elaea Purmalietis: National Disability Employment Awareness Month

Elaea Purmalietis, now a senior in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, was first introduced to the field of psychology by her mother, who herself majored in Psychology at UMN. Taking her first psychology course is what sealed the deal; Elaea officially switched from a major in biology in society and environment to psychology. Lacking connections in the field and Department, she began cold calling professors to look for research opportunities. When she saw Dr. Andrew Oxenham’s profile and research on people who are hard of hearing, she immediately thought, “that’s me.”

Oxenham Lab Research in PNAS

Members of the Psychology Department’s Auditory Perception and Cognition lab, Dr. Anahita Mehta, Dr. Lei Feng, and Professor Andrew Oxenham, recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The paper entitled “Neural auditory contrast enhancement in humans” shows how our ability to detect novel sounds, and to recognize familiar sounds in novel environments, is helped by brain responses that adapt to the ongoing acoustic environment. The work provides the first experimental neural evidence in humans for a theory that was proposed in the early 1980s by University of Minnesota Psychology professor, Neal Viemeister (1944-2020).  The research identifies approaches for improving hearing aids and cochlear implants to take advantage of the new findings.

APC Study on How Age Affects Cortical Tracking

Researchers from the Auditory Perception and Cognition (APC) Lab in the Psychology Department recently released research on the effect of age on cortical tracking of word-level features of continuous competing speech. The paper titled, “Effects of Age on Cortical Tracking of Word-Level Features of Continuous Competing Speech,” was co-authored by Juraj Mesik, Lucia Ray, and Magdalena Wojtczak.

Oxenham and Beim in CI Hackathon

Andrew Oxenham, Distinguished McKnight University professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, was part of the team that organized the world’s first Cochlear Implant Hackathon. Oxenham and Jordan Beim, postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Sciences (CATSS), teamed up with representatives from the University of California San Francisco and Advanced Bionics to create the event.