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       Our research seeks to determine the basic properties of hearing, to describe them using quantitative models, and to relate them to physiology. An example is our work on dynamic processes. It is well-known that dynamic changes in the amplitude and frequency of sound are crucially important in auditory perception. Our experiments ask basic questions, such as how well we can detect and discriminate these dynamic changes. How should we refine the model we have proposed to account for these data? To what extent are the dynamic properties we observe determined by processing in the auditory periphery, i.e., if we did experiments similar to our psychophysical experiments but using responses from the auditory nerve, how would the results compare?

       In one set of experiments currently being conducted in our lab, we ask listeners to detect a particular pattern of amplitude fluctuations in a signal in the presence of additional irrelevant fluctuations. On the basis of these data, we would like to develop and test a model that accounts for the ability of listeners to detect and discriminate between different rates and patterns of amplitude fluctuations in acoustic signals.

       Another set of experiments compares the processing of dynamically-varying monaural and binaural stimulus parameters. The general goal is to determine the extent to which binaural performance can be explained by a simple extension of monaural processes as opposed to specialized processes unique to the binaural auditory system.

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