Speech Science Forum - Emma Holmes (UCL)

Abstract:

We often face the challenge of understanding speech when competing speech is present. Listeners with normal hearing can deploy spatial attention to improve intelligibility in spatialised settings, but it is currently unclear how this interacts with hearing loss across the lifespan. In this talk, I will describe some experiments in which we measured behaviour and brain responses when listeners were cued to selectively attend to a talker on their left or right side. We modelled the underlying processes using active inference, which treats selective attention as a Bayesian inference problem. We have studied these processes in young adults with normal hearing, in children with early-onset hearing loss, and in older adults with age-related hearing loss. Our results imply that hearing loss at different stages of life has distinct effects on how people direct attention to speech.