PhD defense, Wiebke Lamping

PhD defence: On Tuesday 5 November PhD student Wiebke Lamping will defend her PhD thesis “Improving cochlear implant performance through psychophysical measures”

Time and place: Tuesday 5 November at 9:30, Building 341, Auditorium 23

Principal supervisor: Associate Professor Jeremy Marozeau

Co supervisor: Assistant Professor Abigail Kressner

Examiners:

Professor Torsten Dau, Health Tech, DTU

Assistant Professor David Landsberger, New York University

Dr. Dan Gnasia, Oticon Medical

 

Chairperson at defence:

Associate Professor Ewen MacDonald

 

Abstract:

Cochlear implants (CIs) are a an incredible tool to restore hearing to those who suffer from severe hearing loss and deafness. But despite their success for speech in quiet, intelligibility drops significantly in more challenging situations, such as in background noise. Further, the appreciation of music remains rather difficult and CI recipients still struggle substantially when trying to differentiate between different pitches or recognise familiar melodies. For this reason, this work is focused on forming a better understanding of electric hearing and conducting research on how to improve both pitch and speech perception. This was done by manipulating the electric field and steering current or using experimental processing strategies and a behavioural evaluation from the CI listeners. The results show that delivering fine temporal cues at a specific cochlear location may improve pitch perception and that stimulating with less current pulses and thus reducing charge interactions may improve speech perception in noise. Nevertheless, performance varied substantially, as is usual with CI listeners, but large parts of the observed variability could be explained by surrogates for neural survival and/or the severity of channel interactions. Thus the interface between the electrodes and the auditory nerve may play a crucial role in how CI listeners perform across various tasks.

 

Tidspunkt

tir 05 nov 19
9:30 - 12:30

Arrangør