Sound Talking: Maria Chait "The auditory system as the brain’s early warning system"
Channel: IntelligentSoundEng
Date: 2018-01-11

Sound Talking
London Science Museum
3 November 2017

http://www.semanticaudio.co.uk/events/soundtalking/

In my laboratory we use behavioural, brain imaging and eye tracking methods to understand auditory perception and how the brain analyses and represents the dynamics of our surrounding acoustic environment. My presentation will focus on our efforts to uncover the auditory system’s role as the brain’s ‘early warning system’. Hearing is sensitive to a wider space than the other senses (above, below, behind, in the dark…) and is therefore often hypothesized to serve as a monitor – continuously scanning the unfolding acoustic scene for behaviourally-relevant events even when attention is focused elsewhere. Beyond basic science, understanding this capacity of the auditory system is central for designing human-computer interfaces and is crucial for evaluating and quantifying the perceptual consequences of aging and hearing impairment.

Bio
Maria Chait is a Professor of auditory cognitive neuroscience at the Ear Institute, UCL. She moved to UCL in 2007 as a Marie Curie research fellow, following a short post-doc at École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Her PhD research (2006) was conducted at the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program, University of Maryland College Park, USA under the supervision of Jonathan Simon and David Poeppel. She has an undergraduate background in Computer Science, Economics, and East Asian Studies.
Professor Chait is co-director of the Sensory Systems, Technologies and Therapies (SenSyT) PhD program and the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences, and a member of the UCL Neuroscience domain steering group.