MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Current major research themes include cochlear-implant research, from front-end signal processing to objective measures of neural health, neuroplasticity in normal and hearing-impaired listeners, binaural processing, the effects of hearing loss throughout the lifespan, and both physical and computational models of hearing.
The group benefits from a wealth of world-class expertise in psychology, neuroscience, engineering, surgery, speech science, audiology, auditory physiology, electrophysiology, material science, and computer science. We use a wide variety of research tools to produce cutting-edge research. These include psychoacoustics, virtual reality, speech perception, web-based data collection, objective measures such as EEG, biophysical and computational models of the inner ear, cadaveric studies, clinical models, and paediatric studies.
The CHG is open to collaboration with other hearing and speech research groups around the world, and can be contacted in the first instance at chg@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk or tweet us @CamHearingGroup
Conferences
Auditory Science Meeting (ASM) 2024:
Thank you to everyone who attended the Auditory Science Meeting (ASM) 2024 on Thursday 26 – Friday 27th September 2024.
Please note that this is the UK Acoustics Network (UKAN) meeting that has been called ‘Basic Auditory Science (BAS)’ in the past as well as ‘Ear & Hear.’
ASM2024 was hosted by the Cambridge Hearing Group and took place at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. There was accommodation at the college and a conference dinner was included in the price.
The conference has now finished. For further details you may still visit the conference website here.
The ASM Conference will be held in Nottingham next year in September 2025, and specific dates will be announced in due course.
Other Business
Please note that our primary website is currently under construction. We appreciate your patience with this.
Software
Carlyon Filter Model: Carlyon et al (2005) described a simple model which predicts cochlear implant users’ thresholds for electrical pulse trains. We have found that it successfully captures the effects of inter-phase gap, phase duration, and pulse rate over a wide range, and works both for symmetric pulses and for “pseudomonophasic” pulse trains. The model works by by passing the stimulus through a low-pass filter designed to capture the effects of frequency on detection thresholds for sinusoidal electrical stimulation. The software generates the pulse train for you, but can easily be modified to generate sine waves or indeed any analogue waveform. It is written in MATLAB and should run on any platform supporting that language, although we have only tested it on various versions of windows.
The software can be downloaded here. Please note that use of the software is at your own risk and implies acceptance of the disclaimer shown in the readme file.
We hope that you find the software useful; if so please cite the following publication, which contains full details of how the model works:
Carlyon, R. P., van Wieringen, A., Deeks, J. M., Long, C. J., Lyzenga, J., & Wouters, J. (2005). Effect of inter-phase gap on the sensitivity of cochlear implant users to electrical stimulation. Hearing research, 205(1-2), 210–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2005.03.021
webSTRIPES: Archer-Boyd et al (2018) described a spectro-temporal ripple for investigating processor effectiveness (STRIPES), a test that is a psychophysical measure of spectro-temporal resolution in cochlear-implant (CI) listeners. An online application using wireless streaming (webSTRIPES) as a remote test has now also been developed.
The software can be downloaded here. Please note that the use of the software is at your own risk and it is the responsibility of the user to verify safety prior to use.
We hope that you find the software useful; if so please cite the following publication, which contains details of the development of webSTRIPES:
Archer-Boyd, A. W., Harland, A., Goehring, T., & Carlyon, R. P. (2023). An online implementation of a measure of spectro-temporal processing by cochlear-implant listeners. JASA express letters, 3(1), 014402. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0016838
Panoramic ECAP Method: Garcia et al (2021) described a method (PECAP) for estimating current spread and neural responsiveness in Cochlear Implant users at each contact along the electrode array.
The online implementation of PECAP is available at http://panoramic-ecap.com, and the software for data collection may also be downloaded here.
We hope you find this software useful. If using it in support of written or presented research please cite the following publication:
Garcia, C., Goehring, T., Cosentino, S., Turner, R. E., Deeks, J. M., Brochier, T., Rughooputh, T., Bance, M., & Carlyon, R. P. (2021). The Panoramic ECAP Method: Estimating Patient-Specific Patterns of Current Spread and Neural Health in Cochlear Implant Users. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO, 22(5), 567–589. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-021-00795-2
