In this seminar, PhD student, Nina Saeedi will report on her research project which creates a physiologically-inspired neural network model of auditory perception and evaluates its performance in perceiving different aspects of sound. In this network, acoustic and electric models of the auditory system are applied as models of normal hearing and hearing with cochlear implants.

The project assesses model performance in different tasks like pitch perception, vowel recognition and consonant recognition to ensure that it is similar to human performance reported in the literature. It uses this model as a test platform to investigate the effect of the limiting factors on the auditory performance of cochlear implants. These include insufficient temporal resolution, limited number of electrodes and current spread, as well as the inability of the brain to adapt to the information provided by the implant.