Symposium on hearing loss and aging at SfN2014

It's almost time to register and get housing for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in November! I'm excited to announce that Art Wingfield and I are co-chairing a symposium on hearing loss and the brain, Monday November 17th from 8:30-11:00am. We have a great line up of speakers addressing this topic from a variety of angles:

• Andy King (Oxford) will talk about animal electrophysiology and developmental consequences of hearing loss;
• Barb Shinn-Cunningham (Boston University) will talk about how hearing loss interferes with selective auditory attention;
• Paul Miller (Brandeis) will discuss computational approaches that link hearing loss to cognitive processing;
• and I will talk about cognitive consequences of hearing loss using behavioral and functional neuroimaging data from humans.

Here's the preliminary program description:

http://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/neuroscience-2014/sessions-and-events/scientific-program/symposia#Theme-D-Sensory-and-Motor-Systems

Hope to see you in Washington DC!

ArtWingfieldFest

I'm very excited that we are coming up to a Festschrift for my PhD mentor, Art Wingfield. ArtWingfieldFest is going to be held at Brandeis University on July 22, 2014. Art has spent nearly five decades mentoring students, engaging colleagues, and conducting scientific research at an extremely high level. Most of this time has been at Brandeis, where he came in 1968. I am so pleased that we are able to put together an event to honor him for these contributions and to say thank you to someone who is, as a rule, far too humble.

The theme is Age, Hearing, and Speech Comprehension, reflecting Art's research interests over the years. Our speakers include former lab members and other noted researchers in the field: Mark Eckert, Murray Grossman, Mike Kahana, Stefanie Kuchinsky, Kathy Pichora-Fuller, Robert Remez, Bruce Schneider, Liz Stine-Morrow, and Cai Wingfield (who worked at the CBU as a research assistant).

It should be a fantastic day! I will post a follow up when we get some pictures. Please feel free to check out the website: www.artwingfieldfest.com.

Summer lab additions!

It's going to be a busy summer around here. Starting with three new lab members who joined us in June! Sheridan and Vivian are undergraduates at Wash U helping out on several projects over the summer, and Margaret is an AuD student who will be working on a research project over the next year. Welcome!

Sheridan Frank

Vivian Tao

Margaret Koeritzer

Chris Westbury visit to Washington University

Chris Westbury

We were fortunate to have Chris Westbury (personal website / lab website) from the University of Alberta visit Washington University this week. Chris and I are co-authors on a paper but haven't had the chance to meet until now. Chris has done elegant and interesting work on lexical semantics, most recently on looking at the role of emotional attributes in the context of corpus analyses (i.e. semantic associations derived from co-occurrance measures like LSA). It was great to have Chris here, and I'm looking forward to his next visit!

Talk and visit at Purdue University

I'm finishing up a very nice visit to the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University, where I gave a talk and visited with a number of faculty. Many thanks to David Kemmerer for setting this up, and for all of the faculty and students who took time to speak with me today. Lots of interesting work going on here! I look forward to a return visit someday.

Our first senior honors student

Congratulations to Caitlin Ward, who successfully defended her senior honors project this afternoon. Caitlin is majoring in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Wash U and was the first student to join my lab. In her honors project, she conducted an experiment to see whether listening to acoustically-challenging stories has any impact on our ability to remember these stories later. Caitlin updated and standardized a large set of Aesop's Fables, designed her experiment, and collected data from a group of undergraduates. The work is ongoing, and I look forward to sharing results sometime in the coming months. Great job Caitlin!