Seminars in Hearing Research

Date: Thursday, May 1, 2025

Location: Nelson 1215

Time: Noon - 1:00 pm

Speaker: Aidan Seidle, Research Assistant, McPherson Lab, SLHS  

Title: Using Psychophysics and Neural Networks to Explore Auditory Representations

Abstract: Auditory perception is a complex computational problem. Our brains must extract information from signals that are generally noisy or ambiguous in order to guide behavior and build stable representations of the world. In this talk, I will discuss various approaches to studying auditory representations. The first part of the talk will highlight cross-cultural and developmental methods of assessing pitch perception and auditory preferences. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how we can leverage spatial presentation to explore how sounds are compressed into memory. Our preliminary results suggest that location cues aid memory retention in some contexts, but not others. Thus, location may be dissociable from other dimensions of auditory memory. In the final part of the talk, I will discuss my work examining whether auditory deep neural networks (DNNs) can capture task-invariant representations of sound. I tested whether a large set of DNNs could predict human similarity judgements, despite being trained on unrelated tasks. Altogether, this talk covers numerous strategies for assessing auditory representations.

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The working schedule is available here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts