Sanders wins grant to study auditory processing

Lisa Sanders, assistant professor of Psychology, has won a three-year, $224,746 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how people process rapidly changing auditory information.

“Speech comprises an overwhelming amount of pitch and loudness information that changes rapidly over time,” says Sanders. Her research aims to determine whether people select only the most important information for detailed processing or struggle to deal with all the information equally.

Sanders measures the brain waves (event-related potentials) of participants using a system of electrodes as they perform various listening tasks. The data is used to determine how the brain differentially responds to attended and ignored sounds. Her current research is testing the idea that listeners increase their attention when important information is expected and decrease attention when they can predict what will follow.

Sanders’ work may provide information to help children with language problems who sometimes have trouble attending to sounds. “If we can figure out how adults who are skilled at processing speech are using selective attention, then we can help children who have trouble with language by improving their attention skills,” says Sanders. Her research may also benefit adults with age-related hearing loss and individuals learning to hear through cochlear implants.

The grant was awarded by the NIH National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders which conducts and supports research in the normal and disordered processes of hearing, balance, taste, smell, voice, speech and language.

July 10, 2007.

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