Kristina Backer

Real-world listening environments are often noisy. In these acoustically-adverse listening situations, successful speech understanding relies upon interactions between perceptual and cognitive processes, including attention and memory. Thus, my research aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying these perceptual-cognitive interactions in young adult, normal-hearing listeners – especially when listening in challenging, multi-talker situations. A second research aim is to characterize how aging and hearing loss influence the perceptual and cognitive processes that are engaged during effortful listening. Methods used in the laboratory include both behavioral paradigms and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings.