MEZ 126 Dr. McFadden received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. His research Interests are sensation and perception, audition, effects of drugs on the auditory system, sex differences, prenatal hormonal effects on the auditory system. We have shown that subjects are better able to discriminate small sensory changes in stimuli that are perceptually organized than in those that are not. To date, the effect has been demonstrated for frequency discrimination, duration discrimination, and with a speech task, and additional examples can be found in various literatures in experimental psychology.
Otoacoustic emissions are sounds produced in the inner ear.
They are stronger and more numerous in females than in males, and we have been studying the mechanisms underlying this fact. We believe that OAEs have the potential to serve as an noninvasive window onto prenatal developmental processes. My Macintosh-based lab is equipped to synthesize and generate simple and complex auditory waveforms, and to test up to eight subjects simultaneously in a wide array of standard psychoacoustical tasks. We also have an advanced system for recording and analyzing otoacoustic emissions. We use LabVIEW for generating waveforms, controlling experiments, and some data analysis.