Robust speech processing in human auditory cortex

Abstract

The brain empowers humans with remarkable abilities to navigate their acoustic environment in highly degraded conditions. This seemingly trivial task for normal hearing listeners is extremely challenging for individuals with auditory pathway disorders, and has proven very difficult to model and implement algorithmically in machines. In this talk, I will present the result of an interdisciplinary research effort where invasive and non-invasive neural recordings from human auditory cortex are used to determine the representational and computational properties of robust speech processing in the human brain. These findings show that speech processing in the auditory cortex is dynamic and adaptive. These intrinsic properties allow a listener to filter out irrelevant sound sources, resulting in a reliable and robust means of communication. Furthermore, incorporating the functional properties of neural mechanisms in speech processing models greatly impact the current models of speech perception and at the same time, lead to human-like automatic speech processing technologies.The brain empowers humans with remarkable abilities to navigate their acoustic environment in highly degraded conditions. This seemingly trivial task for normal hearing listeners is extremely challenging for individuals with auditory pathway disorders, and has proven very difficult to model and implement algorithmically in machines. In this talk, I will present the result of an interdisciplinary research effort where invasive and non-invasive neural recordings from human auditory cortex are used to determine the representational and computational properties of robust speech processing in the human brain. These findings show that speech processing in the auditory cortex is dynamic and adaptive. These intrinsic properties allow a listener to filter out irrelevant sound sources, resulting in a reliable and robust means of communication. Furthermore, incorporating the functional properties of neural mechanisms in speech processing models greatly impact the current models of speech perception and at the same t...