BSA 2008 Conference report
10 October 2008
Last month saw the annual British Society of Audiology (BSA) Short Papers Meeting of Experimental Studies on Hearing and Deafness. The UK’s hearing research community descended on the Psychology Department at the University of York for two days of talks, poster presentations and catching-up with the latest experimental data.
This year’s was an excellent meeting with scientists supported by Deafness Research UK well represented throughout.
Professor Robert V. Shannon gave the Ted Evans Lecture, which was established by the charity in 2004, in honour of the auditory physiologist Professor Ted Evans who co-ordinated this meeting until his retirement. Professor Shannon, whose talk was entitled Electric stimulation of the human cochlea, cochlear nucleus and inferior colliculus: Implications for speech recognition, presented some very interesting results from patients without an auditory nerve who had prosthetic implants into their brainstem or midbrain. A new hypothesis that emerges from the data is that the normal auditory system has a specialised region within it that specifically processes speech patterns. An understanding of how this area affects our ability to recognise speech could mean that patients with cochlear and other implants could get more out of them.
Two studies supported by Deafness Research UK also featured in the oral communication sessions. Professor Brian Moore of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge gave a talk about his research with Dr Alexander Sek. The pair has worked to develop tests that would enable patients to have hearing aids fitted with the right type of signal-processing technology, based on which features of the timing information in sounds the patient is most sensitive to. Also speaking was last year’s Pauline Ashley Prize winner, Dr Lucy Anderson, who reported on her prize visit to the University of Salamanca where she shed light on one of the less-studied pathways between the early stages of the hearing system and the auditory cortex.
DRUK doctoral students Jason Mikiel-Hunter, Nick Leach and Rosemary Lovett were all in attendance presenting posters on their research amongst the many presentations from more established scientists. Jason’s poster looked at the differences between cells that respond to high compared to low sound frequencies early in the hearing pathway that processes the spatial location of sounds. Nick showed data on the effect of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine on sound localization and Rosie presented work on the listening skills of children with one compared to two cochlear implants.
Rosie was also the winner of this year’s Pauline Ashley Prize, which was presented to her at the meeting. She will travel to the Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, to collaborate with Professor Jay Rubinstein on a project aiming to predict the ability of infants and toddlers with cochlear implants to understand speech. If successful, the technique could provide feedback to clinicians who tune implants, enabling children to get the best out of them. Such measures could also provide information to teachers and therapists about children’s potential in speech perception. Rosie said “I am extremely grateful to Deafness Research UK for giving me the opportunity to visit one of the foremost hearing research centres in the world. I will learn techniques for measuring the hearing of profoundly deaf babies and toddlers who use cochlear implants. I plan to use the techniques in future research in the UK.”
Vacation scholarship-winning undergraduate students were also represented in the poster sessions. Kristina Gedguadaite is a third year undergraduate who spent two months working with Professor Stuart Rosen and Dr Andrew Faulkner at University College London this summer on a project aiming to improve the ability of cochlear implant users to understand speech. Charlotte Caunt, then a final year undergraduate, took part in research at the MRC Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham with Dr Katrin Krumbholz and presented data showing that changes in the pitch of a sound are easier to detect than a static pitch.
Deafness Research UK also supported work presented in posters by Dr David Furness’ research team at Keele University who are studying outer hair cells and support cells in the cochlea, Dr Lucy Anderson and Dr Jennifer Linden at the UCL Ear Institute who looked at how individual cells respond to commonly and rarely presented sounds and Professor Meddis and his research group at the University of Essex who have been working on the Human Dummy Project to develop individualised computer models of hearing impairment.
