Auditory Research in Cognitive Neuroscience. Interested in multisensory integration - how do other senses like touch and sight contribute to the brain's ability to process speech in difficult listening conditions?

I am a cognitive neuroscientist at heart, with interest in all things speech perception! From how we listen to and understand speech in difficult listening conditions, to how hearing loss affects our brain's ability to process and make sense of our auditory environment.

Particularly in my current PhD research, I have been investigating how our different senses come together to assist with our hearing when it become difficult to understand speech around us. I have investigated audio-visual integration through lip-reading at a behavioural level - how does seeing a speaker's lips improve our understanding, and how may this have been affected through facemask wearing in Covid-19? I am also very interested in how we can use the sense of touch in absence of vision to help our speech perception. To this end, I have run multiple audio-tactile training studies in my PhD so far, using Electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how we may use the sense of touch to both improve neural integration (through cortical speech-envelope tracking) and our behavioural understanding of speech in difficult listening conditions.