Laurie Heller

Laurie Heller is a teaching professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research examines the human ability to use sound to understand events happening in the environment. Heller's perceptual experiments discover acoustic cues that reveal attributes of sound events, and how our knowledge of these cue-attribute relationships influences our recognition of sounds. She has also examined how this knowledge influences which brain regions are recruited during the perception of sound events. Heller's multimodal experiments have combined hearing and vision as well as asking whether sound affects the gestures we make. Her research on sound localization included teaching naive listeners to learn to extract information from echoes about the surrounding environment. Ongoing work involves the perception of sound categories and the effects of unwanted sounds. Collaborative applications are being developed to test sound recognition in hearing impaired listeners and to improve the performance of a machine learning system for sound event classification. Applications of Heller's research have the potential to enhance auditory displays, hearing aids, and navigation aids for the visually impaired.