WMBC13001 – Auditory and Visual Perception

2020-2021 Schedule

 

Information About (some of) the People Involved in the Course

Prof. Chris Plack (School of Psychological Sciences, Univ. of Manchester)

Chris Plack was educated at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, where he obtained a BA in Natural Sciences in 1987 and a PhD in 1990. He worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for two years at the University of Minnesota, and for two years at the University of Sussex, before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1994. He moved to the University of Essex in 1998, and was promoted to Chair in 2001. He moved again to Lancaster University in 2005, before obtaining his present position of Ellis Llwyd Jones Professor of Audiology at the University of Manchester in 2008. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. For more information, see http://bit.ly/2chmhnW

Prof. Deniz Baṣkent (Faculty of Medical Sciences, UMCG)

Deniz Başkent is professor of Auditory Perception. She received a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at University of Southern California, USA, in 2003, on speech perception by cochlear-implant users. Following a postdoctoral position at the House Ear Institute, Deniz joined the Starkey Hearing Research Center, in Berkeley, CA, as a research scientist. In 2009, Deniz received a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship and joined the faculty of the Otorhinolaryngology Department of the UMCG. Her main research interests are in sound and speech perception in complex listening environments by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, and understanding the perceptual and cognitive effects of hearing impairment, and hearing-aid or cochlear-implant processing, with the goal of improving quality of life and listening performance with the assistive auditory devices. For more information, see http://dbaskent.org

Dr. Laura Rachman (Faculty of Medical Sciences, UMCG)

 

Laura’s research focuses on the effects of hearing loss and aging on voice and speech perception. During her PhD at IRCAM and the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris, she investigated the role of speaker and language familiarity on emotional voice perception, using voice transformation software. She is interested in combining behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) measures to study different processing stages involved speech perception, from low-level perception of voice cues to higher level speech understanding.

Dr. Thomas Koelewijn (Faculty of Medical Sciences, UMCG)

Thomas joined the dB SPL group in 2019, where he investigates difficulties in voice identification, often experienced by cochlear implant users. He is interested in how low- and high-level language processing interacts during voice/speech perception and how this affects listening effort. After his PhD (2009) on cross-modal spatial attention, he worked as a researcher at the department of Ear & Hearing at the Amsterdam UMC. He worked on three projects (two financed by personal grants) that validated Pupillometry as a tool for measuring listening effort, and investigated how cognitive processes like working memory, attention, and motivation affect the pupil dilation response during effortful listening. During these projects Thomas collaborated with researchers in Boston, Linköping, Snekkersten, and Montreal and co-organized a biyearly workshop on the application of pupillometry in hearing science to assess listening effort.

Dr. Tassos Sarampalis (Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, RUG)

Dr. Sarampalis is a lecturer at the Psychology department of the University of Groningen. He began his career in psychoacoustics in the UKwhere he worked with Deb Fantini and Chris Plack, before moving to California to work on hearing devices, first with Monita Chatterjee and then with Erv Hafter. His current research interests involve understanding the contributions of cognition in complex hearing situations and the interactions of cognition and hearing impairment.

 

 

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