IERC talk - Dr. Giovanni Di Liberto: "Investigating auditory cognition with natural speech and music”

This month, we are delighted to have a talk from Dr Giovanni Di Liberto, Assistant Professor in Intelligent Systems at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at TCD. Please find the abstract below: Perception involves making sense of the world around us by processing a continuous flow of sensory information. In doing so, the human brain produces electrical activity that synchronises to particular properties of sensory inputs, a phenomenon referred to as neural tracking. The case of auditory perception is particularly remarkable. The discovery that neural signals reliably track the amplitude envelope of continuous sounds has led to new research directions, such as the study of auditory attention in immersive multi-talker scenarios. Here, I will present a series of studies investigating the neural tracking phenomenon when listening to speech and music, whereby both low-level acoustic properties and more abstract linguistic structures have to be processed. I will demonstrate methodologies for disentangling neural responses to stimulus properties at different levels of abstraction from a single electroencephalography recording. I will then describe recent developments where the resulting objective neural indices are used for probing auditory perception across various contexts, such as language learning and developmental research.