Martha M Shiell

Eriksholm Research Centre

The right planum temporale region is typically involved in higher-order auditory processing. After deafness, this area reorganizes to become sensitive to visual motion. This plasticity is thought to support compensatory enhancements to visual ability. In earlier work we showed that enhanced visual motion detection abilities in early-deaf people cor...

After sensory loss, the deprived cortex can reorganize to process information from the remaining modalities, a phenomenon known as cross-modal reorganization. In blind people this cross-modal processing supports compensatory behavioural enhancements in the nondeprived modalities. Deaf people also show some compensatory visual enhancements, but a di...

Cross-modal reorganization after sensory deprivation is a model for understanding brain plasticity. Although it is a well-documented phenomenon, we still know little of the mechanisms underlying it or the factors that constrain and promote it. Using fMRI, we identified visual motion-related activity in 17 early-deaf and 17 hearing adults. We found...

In deaf people, the auditory cortex can reorganize to support visual motion processing. Although this cross-modal reorganization has long been thought to subserve enhanced visual abilities, previous research has been unsuccessful at identifying behavioural enhancements specific to motion processing. Recently, research with congenitally deaf cats ha...

The ability to detect changes in complex auditory scenes is crucial for human survival, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain elusive. This study investigates how the presence and location of sound sources impacts active auditory change detection as well as neural correlates of passive change detection. We employed stimuli design...

Purpose There is a need for tools to study real-world communication abilities in people with hearing loss. We outline a potential method for this that analyzes gaze and use it to answer the question of when and how much listeners with hearing loss look toward a new talker in a conversation. Method Twenty-two older adults with hearing loss followed...

Purpose: There is a need for outcome measures that predict real-world communication abilities in hearing-impaired people. We outline a potential method for this and use it to answer the question of when, and how much, hearing-impaired listeners look towards a new talker in a conversation. Method: Twenty-two older hearing-impaired adults followed a...

This presentation details and evaluates a method for estimating the attended speaker during a two-person conversation by means of in-ear electro-oculography (EOG). Twenty-five hearing-impaired participants were fitted with molds equipped with EOG electrodes (in-ear EOG) and wore eye-tracking glasses while watching a video of two life-size people in...

No PDF available ABSTRACT The ability to understand speech in complex listening environments reflects an interaction of cognitive and sensory capacities that are difficult to capture with behavioural tests. The study of natural listening behaviours may lead to the development of new metrics that better reflect real-life communication abilities. To...

Selective attention is essential for the processing of multi-speaker auditory scenes because they require the perceptual segregation of the relevant speech (“target”) from irrelevant speech (“distractors”). For simple sounds, it has been suggested that the processing of multiple distractor sounds depends on bottom-up factors affecting task performa...

Primary and posterior auditory cortex (AC) are known for sensitivity to spatial information, but how this information is processed is not yet understood. AC that is sensitive to spatial manipulations is also modulated by the number of auditory streams present in a scene (Smith et al. 2009), suggesting that spatial and non-spatial cues are integrate...

The ability to dance relies on the ability to synchronize movements to a perceived musical beat. Typically, beat synchronization is studied with auditory stimuli. However, in many typical social dancing situations, music can also be perceived as vibrations when objects that generate sounds also generate vibrations. This vibrotactile musical percept...

After early deafness, the brain can reorganize so that the sensory-deprived auditory cortex processes visual information. This cross-modal activity has been demonstrated numerous times in functional brain imaging research, but we still know little about the underlying mechanisms, the factors that constrain it, and its behavioural consequences. In t...

The study of cross-modal reorganization after sensory deprivation can be a powerful strategy for understanding the functional structure of the brain. This strategy rests on the hypothesis that the brain follows a metamodal organization, with specific regions or networks responsible for specific