Dr. Laurie Heller

Biography

Laurie Heller’s research examines human abilities to use sound to understand events happening in the environment. Her perceptual experiments discover acoustic cues that reveal attributes of sound events, and how knowledge of cue-attribute relationships influences the recognition of sounds. She has examined how knowledge influences the brain regions recruited for perception of sound events. Heller’s multimodal experiments combine hearing and vision, exploring how sound affects gestures and movements. In her research on sound localization, she has included teaching naive listeners to learn how to extract information from echoes in their surrounding environment. Ongoing work involves the perception of sound categories and the effects of unwanted sounds. Collaborative applications have been developed to test sound recognition in hearing-impaired listeners, aiming to improve performance in machine learning systems for sound event classification. The applications of her research have the potential to enhance auditory displays, hearing aids, and aids for the visually impaired.

Research Interests