Oxenham Lab Research in PNAS

Members of the Psychology Department’s Auditory Perception and Cognition lab, Dr. Anahita MehtaDr. 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.

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