Auditory Behavioral Research Lab
ABRL News
March 2025
Reagan Huynh (undergraduate, mentor: Dr. Robert Lutfi) received a 2025 College of Behavioral & Community Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarship Award and presented at CBCS Undergraduate Research Scholarship Reception and CSD research day!
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January 2024
Gabriella Brown (undergraduate, mentor: Dr. Jungmee Lee) received a 2024 College of
Behavioral & Community Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarship Award!
December 2023
Dr. Jungmee Lee got elected as a fellow of Acoustical Society of America
January 2023
Sarah Grover got a travel award from the American Auditory Society (AAS) to present her research present her research under the Resident and Graduate Student Mentored Reasearch Poster Session. The title of her research poster was "Envelope Following Response Partly Explains Individual Differences in Cocktail-party Effect."
Abstract: Young listeners with clinically normal hearing show large variability in their ability to segregate the speech of multiple talkers speaking simultaneously, the so-called cocktail-party effect (CPE, Cherry, 1952). Lutfi et al. (2020) used perturbation analysis (Berg, 1990) to evaluate two general factors thought to be responsible for the individual differences: decision weights 鈥� the relative reliance listeners place on individual segregation cues, and internal noise 鈥� degradations in the internal representation of segregation cues resulting from stochastic neural processes. The authors concluded that individual differences in performance in their experiments were mainly due to internal noise, but they did not consider the source of the internal noise. The present study evaluated Envelope Following Responses (EFR) using rectangular wave, amplitude-modulated (RAM) at 40 and 120 Hz to measure possible contributions of the cortex and midbrain to internal noise in a CPE task similar to that of Lutfi et al. (2020).
June 2022
Dr. Jungmee Lee got invited to give a talk at Korean Otological Society.
January 2022
Lindsey Kummerer got a travel award from the American Auditory Society (AAS) to present her research present her research under the Resident and Graduate Student Mentored Reasearch Poster Session. The title of her research poster was "Possible Contribution of the Cochlea to Individual Differences in a Speech-in-Noise Task, Measured by Stimulus Frequency Otoacoustic Emissions."
Abstract:
There is large variation in performance on speech-in-noise (SIN) tasks among individuals with normal audiometric thresholds (Killion, 2002). Cochlear pathology missed by standard audiometric evaluation has not been ruled out as a possible cause for this variation (Plack et al., 2014). A more sensitive measure than audiometric thresholds for assessing the presence of cochlear pathology may be the fine structure of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). The fine structure of OAEs, given by the peaks and dips in the magnitude of OAEs measured in fine frequency steps, has been shown to provide an early indicator of cochlear pathology (Ellison & Keefe, 2005; Engdahl & Kemp, 1996; Abdala et al., 2019; Kalluri and Shera, 2013) and to be predictive of performance in a variety of supra-threshold auditory tasks (Mauermann et al., 2004; Lee et al., 2016; Stiepan et al. 2020). The present study used stimulus-frequency OAEs (SFOAEs) to evaluate possible cochlear contributions to individual differences in SIN performance for 22 young adults. A relationship was found between QuickSIN scores and the signal-to-noise ratio of SFOAE fine structure, contrary to findings by Stiepan et al. (2020), where they found a relationship between QuickSIN scores and noise floor. Our results suggest that reduced function of outer hair cells contributes to increased difficulty in SIN for clinically normal hearing listeners, not physiological noise.
[Supported by NIDCD R01-DC001262-26].
December 2021
Briana Rodriguez got a travel award from the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) to present a paper "Talker identification based on covariance in voicing cues" at the 45th annual conference on San Jose, CA on Feb 5-9, 2022.
Conference website:
December 2019
John Sheets got 2020 travel award from American Auditory Society (AAS) to present his research under "Resident and Graduate Student Mentored Research Poster Session". The conference will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Scottsdale Resort (formerly the Chaparral Suites Scottsdale) from March 5 - 7, 2020.
Conference website:
December 2019
Kelly Smith's abstract was accepted for American Academy of Audiology (AAA) 2020/HearTech Expo which will be held on April 1 - 4, 2020 in New Orleans.
Conference website:
November, 2019
Dr. Robert Lutfi and Dr. Jungmee Lee got invited to give talks at a session "Individual differences in auditory processing" during FORUM ACUSTICUM 2020, Lyon, France.
conference website:
July, 2019
Robert Lutfi, PhD (PI), Jungmee Lee, PhD (Co-I) and Ann Eddins, PhD (Co-I) have received a $2,386,000 grant from the The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) for a five year project entitled "Individual Differences Listening in Noise in Clinically Normal-hearing Adults".
July 25, 26, 2019
John Sheets and Briana Rodriguez presented their research at Knowles Conference, Northwestern University on July 25 & 26, 2019.
Conference information:
May 16, 2019
Briana Rodriguez presented a poster, "Synergy of Spectral and Spatial Segregation Cues in Simulated Cocktail Party Listening" by Briana Rodriguez, Jungmee Lee & Robert Lutfi at the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Louisville, KY, USA on May 16, 2019, in session 4aPP, Spatial Hearing, Complex Acoustic Scenes, and Clinical Devices (Poster Session).
ASA meeting information:
Abstract:
An approach is borrowed from Measurement Theory [Krantz et al. (1971). Foundations
of Measurement, Vol.1] to evaluate the interaction of spectral and spatial cues in
the segregation of talkers in
simulated cocktail-party listening. The goal is to determine whether mathematical
transformations exist
whereby the combined effect of cues can be additively related to their individual
effects. On each trial, the
listener judged whether an interleaved sequ