How does selectively attending to specific time points and different time scales affect perception?  When faced with more information than can be processed in detail, observers may direct selective attention to the times at which they predict the most relevant information will be presented.  In a series of studies, we are exploring the effectiveness of a variety of temporal cues, the conditions under which people are most likely to employ temporally selective attention, and the impact of temporally selective attention on auditory and visual perception.  Further, we are conducting studies to determine how people use temporally selective attention to understand speech, appreciate music, and process moving images.

It is well established that selectively attending to specific locations and spatial scales (i.e., local and global levels) affects the extent to which auditory and visual information is processed.  We are conducting studies to define the flexibility and precision of spatially selective attention.  We are also interested in interactions between spatially and temporally selective attention, distinct neural systems for controlling the location and scale of selective attention, and how the development of selective attention impacts language acquisition.

Understanding speech and other important auditory information in the presence of concurrent noise and reverberant energy depends, in part, on listeners' ability to localize sounds to specific sources.  We are interested in how dysfunction of peripheral auditory systems, development of sensory systems and cross-modal plasticity, and recent experience with specific acoustic environments affects listeners' ability to localize sounds.  We are testing the hypothesis that problems with auditory localization lead to deficiencies in auditory spatially selective attention and, therefore, to difficulty in understanding concurrent sounds.

Speech is arguably the most important and challenging auditory signal for human sensory and perceptual systems.  We are conducting a series of studies to determine the ways in which selective attention helps listeners to process speech.  Additionally, we are exploring how early language experience shapes the time points and features listeners attend to and the extent to which domain general mechanisms help people to acquire new languages.  As with auditory localization, we are also interested in how immediate context (as opposed to past experience) affects phonological and syntactic processing.

Music, like speech, comprises complex pitch and timbre information that changes rapidly.  We are interested in understanding how temporally selective attention contributes to music perception and the ways in which experience with music shapes what listeners attend to and what they hear.  Through direct comparisons of music and speech perception, we hope to contribute to what is known about the shared and distinct neural systems that support these abilities.

Each of the systems described above represents a very complex skill that typical adults carry out effortlessly.  By studying how selective attention and auditory perception develop in infants and young children, we can better isolate the individual processes that contribute to complex cognitive abilities.  Further, by defining the times during development in which specific types of experience are needed for optimal brain organization, we can contribute to the development of education programs that maximize the outcomes for every child.