Laurie Heller
Lecturer & Assistant Professor (Research):
Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
Phone: +1 401 863 3989
Laurie_Heller@Brown.EDU
My auditory research examines the human ability to understand what events are happening in the environment through sound. Perceptual experiments address whether there are auditory prototypes that represent different event attributes, whether those prototypes can be used to predict psychological phenomena such as a preference for exaggeration or the ability to recognize caricatures, and whether audition plays a significant role in the perception of multi-modal events. This basic research will relate psychological performance to acoustic properties and high-level auditory information. The results of this research may have potential to enhance hearing aids and auditory displays.
Biography
After receiving my bachelor of science from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, I conducted doctoral (U. of Pennsylvania) and postdoctoral (U. of Conn.) research on the auditory perception of sound location, motivated by fundamental questions about how people segregate multiple sources of information in complex scenes and how people perceive the space around them. I have also conducted research on auditory health, using otoacoustic emissions (sound emitted from the ear) as a tool to detect and prevent hearing loss. I have also tested the limits of human sensitivity to very brief sounds and underwater sounds.
Interests
How is high-level auditory information about our environment organized? There is a strong theoretical basis for connecting auditory perception with events rather than objects. It is a "tree falling in the forest" that is heard, not just the tree. Sound is generated by the physical interactions of objects, surfaces, and substances – in other words, events. The sound waveform contains a great deal of potential information about its sources properties. However, no single acoustic feature specifies a particular object or action. Information about sound sources is complex and time-varying, and it is not known to what degree or in what form it is exploited by human listeners. My research examines the human ability to understand what events are happening in the environment through sound. Perceptual experiments address whether there are auditory prototypes (or central exemplars) that represent different event attributes, whether those prototypes can be used to predict psychological phenomena such as a preference for exaggeration or the ability to recognize caricatures, and whether audition plays a significant role in the perception of multi-modal events. This basic research will relate psychological performance to acoustic properties and high-level auditory information.The results of this research may have the potential to enhance processing for hearing aids and improve auditory displays, both for virtual reality and for visually impaired computer users. I believe that immersive and interactive human/machine interfaces of the future will need to make advances in auditory interfaces as well as addressing the interaction between audition and vision.
Awards
Natural Science Association Fellowhip, 1987-1989
Postdoctoral training fellowship, 1992-4
Brown Chapter of Sigma Xi, 2005-6
Affiliations
Acoustical Society of America
Association for Psychological Science
American Psychological Association
Vision Sciences Society
Sigma Xi
Funded Research
National Science Foundation Grant: Auditory Perception of Events. Three-year grant funded on 09/01/05. $283,724.
Rhode Island Research Alliance STAC Grant: Launching Rhode Island as the R & D Nexus for Next Generation Hearing Devices. Funded 01/08, $84,500
