Pragati Rao on auditory and cognitive statistical learning in musicians
Date:
Fri, 01/18/2019 - 10:30am - 12:00pm
Location:
Seminar Room at the Knoll
Event Type:
Hearing Seminar Maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the speech world figured out the importance of statistical language models, and we saw the first big improvements in speech-recognition performance. Hurray! This top-down knowledge dramatically constrains the number of words that might come next, and definitely affects our perception. You kind of know that the word elephant is not going to show up in a normal conversation, until now.
Who: Pragati Rao (EarLens)
What: Auditory and cognitive statistical learning in musicians
When: Friday January 18, at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room
Why: Because we’d like better models of how we perceive music
Presenter: Pragati Rao Mandikal Vasuki
Abstract:
Statistical learning ability helps individuals to extract probabilistic regularities from input signals without conscious awareness. It has been thought that musicians’ prolonged training may be associated with enhancements in the ability to extract statistical information as repeated practice and exposure, primes and sharpens musicians’ intuition for such tasks. Questions whether musicians’ auditory processing or cognitive processing abilities play a role in shaping their statistical learning performance remain to be explored. I will present behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) data from adults and children that aim to answer some of these questions.
Bio:
Pragati trained as an audiologist in India and received the prestigious Australian Leadership award to pursue her doctorate in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). Subsequently, she worked as a research audiologist at Starkey Hearing Research Center. At Starkey, she investigated novel speech enhancement technologies and led a project on measurement of listening effort through EEG. At present, she is a research audiologist and hearing scientist at Earlens, where is she working on projects that demonstrate benefits of the extended bandwidth Earlens hearing devices.
FREE
Open to the Public