BrainWave on Demand

Purmalietis highlights the nature of her condition, noting that the absence of a visible hearing aid often leads others to overlook her struggles. She emphasizes that ignoring others who try to initiate a conversation is not intentional rudeness but rather a consequence of her difficulty in hearing things around her in the environment. Individuals may not know they should get her attention by tapping her or making sure Purmalietis can see them before they start talking.

Nevertheless, Purmalietis remains resilient, stating, "I refuse to let it define me negatively or isolate me. Instead, I proactively inform people about my hearing impairment." She highlights the importance of seeking support from resources like the Disability Resource Center (DRC), which facilitates appropriate accommodations to enhance accessibility in academic settings.

Elaea Purmalietis is a post-bacc researcher in the Auditory Perception and Cognition Lab (APC Lab). In Fall 2024 she will start her graduate studies in Psychology, advised by Andrew Oxenham.

Andrew Oxenham receiving the award
from CLA's Interim Dean Ann WaltnerWe are excited to announce that Andrew Oxenham has received the Waldfogel Scholar of the College Award. This honor supports faculty research and creative activities. They are scholars who have taken intellectual risks, whose work has achieved a high level of distinction, and who have transformed the way knowledge is constructed.  

The award also honors the legacy of Professor Melvin Waldfogel. Professor Waldfogel joined the University of Minnesota's Art History faculty in 1955 and taught for three decades.

We appreciate Andrew Oxenham’s many meaningful contributions to both the Psychology Department and the College of Liberal Arts. 

The project delves into the realm of auditory temporal processing, aiming to unravel the impacts of age and hearing loss on declines in communication abilities, by using both perceptual and electrophysiological methods. Wojtczak's research explains the nuances of neural tracking of natural speech, offering a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in the processing of speech in noisy backgrounds. 

Wojtczak's work seeks to fill knowledge gaps in diagnosing and treating hearing disorders by characterizing the cochlear, neural, and cognitive aspects contributing to changes in speech perception and neural responses induced by aging and hearing impairment. This research will have the potential to advance our understanding of auditory processing mechanisms and pave the way for innovative interventions in hearing healthcare.

Magdalena Wojtczak, PhD, Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and member of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Lab at the University of Minnesota.

Emily Allen, PhD and Juraj Mesik, PhD have been appointed Research Assistant Professors in the Department of Psychology. Both are members of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory. Congratulations Emily and Juraj!  

On February 3-7, 2024 a large contingent of the APC lab attended the 47th Annual MidWinter Meeting for the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) in Anaheim, CA.  Lab members shared their research in eleven poster presentations:

Kids and their parents had the opportunity to examine a 3D model of the ear and learn about the cochlea, the middle ear bones, and parts of the vestibular system. They also had the chance to hear different sound frequencies, durations, and changes in loudness, and to make their own new "recipe" of digitally combined musical orchestra sounds. As part of this event, Maxwell fielded several questions from adults about hearing loss, hearing aids, and the connections between hearing and cognitive function. Over one thousand people of all ages attended this educational outreach event.

Current Job Title: Research Assistant Professor

Current website: UW Laboratory for Auditory Neuroscience and Development (LAND) Lab

Favorite current project: I am working on a longitudinal study using magnetoencephalography to investigate auditory brain development in the first year of life in typical-hearing and hard-of-hearing infants. The very first participants in this study are now almost 5 years old and we recently received funding to bring them back into the lab for a follow-up visit. It has been really exciting to see them back in the lab! 

If your current job isn’t your first position since leaving the University of Minnesota, where else have you worked? Institute for Language and Brain Sciences

When were you in the APC Lab? 2014/2015

What position did you have during your time at the APC Lab? Postdoc

What was your favorite project/paper from your time in the APC Lab? This is the first paper where I started combining EEG and psychophysics, recorded a visual evoked potential, and had the privilege of working with a fellow APC lab member at the time, Dorea Ruggles. 

Favorite restaurant to grab a bite to eat in the Twin Cities/campus? I enjoyed eating Vietnamese food in the Twin Cities.

Do you have any funny stories about your time in the lab to share? Besides doing research, one of the things I wanted to accomplish the most during my time in the lab was to go ice fishing. It was more fun than I expected!

Favorite scientific conference to attend? It’s a tie between ARO and ASA.

Any words of advice for current students/researchers? Enjoy your time in the APC Lab, especially your labmates – there’s no place like it!

Current Job Title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Current website: jacksongravesphd.webnode.page

Favorite current project: In Michigan, our current project looks at harmony perception using chords and their “metamers”, stimuli that are physically different, but with equivalent outputs in an auditory model. We hope this will tell us more about how harmony (multiple simultaneous pitches) could be coded by the auditory system. We’re pretty excited about it!

If your current job isn’t your first position since leaving the University of Minnesota, where else have you worked? During my PhD, I spent 6 months in 2017 working with Dr. Barbara Tillmann and Dr. Anne Caclin at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CRNL) in Lyon, France. This short stay produced a lot of continuing collaboration on projects about congenital amusia (tone deafness). After finishing my PhD in Minnesota, I then spent 5 years (2018-2022) as a postdoc in the Perceptual Systems Laboratory (LSP) of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Working with Dr. Daniel Pressnitzer and Dr. Paul Egré, we used measures like pupillometry to identify signals of perceptual uncertainty.

When were you in the APC Lab?  January 2011 – January 2018

What position did you have during your time at the APC Lab? I started in the lab as an undergraduate (2011-2012) doing a research project for my senior thesis. I liked it so much I then went on to do a PhD in the lab (2012-2018).

What was your favorite project/paper from your time in the APC Lab? I still remember working with Andrew and Christophe Micheyl on my senior thesis project, which ultimately became my first paper (2014, JEP:HPP). Meetings with Andrew and Chris where we puzzled things out together, drew on the whiteboard, debugged code, looked at the data in new ways and learned something for the first time – these still stick in my memory as the experiences that convinced me I wanted a career in science.

Favorite restaurant to grab a bite to eat in the Twin Cities/campus? You can’t beat the spicy falafel sandwich at Wally’s in Dinkytown! And it’s only a short walk from the APC lab.

Do you have any funny stories about your time in the lab to share? The funniest thing about the APC lab is how disturbing and unnatural it sounds when everybody sings Happy Birthday perfectly in tune. (Is this still true?) It’s a very generous lab: when I defended my PhD, the lab gave me some essential gifts for anyone about to live in France: a beret and a fake mustache. I kept them for Halloween costumes!

Favorite scientific conference to attend? Probably ASA, but it’s a tough choice between ASA and ARO!

Any words of advice for current students/researchers? Be kind to yourself and to your lab mates. Give grace and understanding to yourself and to your lab mates. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, and don’t be too hard on yourself when things don’t go as smoothly as planned, because that’s a normal part of the process. We’re all figuring it out together.

Oxenham’s project combines behavioral and neuroimaging studies in infants and adults with normal and impaired hearing to better understand how our sense of pitch in music and speech is extracted from the acoustic information within the ear. Through a subcontract, researchers at the University of Washington will study infants, as part of a focus on how the perception and neural coding of pitch change throughout one's lifespan. The outcomes of the study will help to improve technology like hearing aids and cochlear implants.

Andrew Oxenham, PhD is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory.  

Congratulations on receiving this prestigious grant, Dr. Allen!

Emily Allen, PhD, research associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory, which is directed by Andrew Oxehham.

Congratulations to Zi Gao, psychology graduate student and member of the APC Lab, for being awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship by the Graduate School. This prestigious fellowship is awarded to the most promising PhD students from across the University to support them in their final year of their PhD program.

Current Job Title: Research Scientist

When were you in the APC Lab? 2015-2020

What position did you have during your time at the APC Lab (e.g. PhD student, postdoc)? Junior Scientist and PhD student

What was your favorite project/paper from your time in the APC Lab? It’s so hard to pick just one! Experiences from two different projects stand out in my mind. 

I did a fair amount of data collection that involved having middle-aged and older adults with normal hearing listen to speech that was processed to simulate the degraded sound those with cochlear implants might experience. Some of the participants I recruited were close family members and friends. It was neat to have them listen to degraded speech for an extended period of time and really experience what hearing and understanding speech on a daily basis is like for me. I think it created a level of understanding that would have been hard to replicate outside of the lab.

Another project I worked on during my time in the APC Lab involved creating and recording sentences without any contextual meaning. The stimuli are now online and available for anyone to use. It has been really cool to run into other scientists using these stimuli, especially since two of the recorded voices are my brother and father-in-law. It’s really funny to hear what other scientists think of their voices!

Favorite restaurant to grab a bite to eat in the Twin Cities/campus? My favorite restaurants on campus were Haiku and Annie’s Parlor. I always ate the Steak Bento Box at Haiku and a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake at Annie’s. Unfortunately, I think both places might have closed during the pandemic.

Do you have any funny stories about your time in the lab to share? Once I was running a particularly eccentric participant with cochlear implants on a task that involved listening for a probe tone among masking tones. The participant was instructed to hold down the Spacebar when they heard the probe tone and let go when they stopped hearing it. These trials would typically last about 10 minutes with the probe tone being audible and inaudible off and on throughout the trial. While I was monitoring one of these trials, I noticed that the participant was responding in a way that, well, seemed a little off, given the stimuli. After the trial finished, I looked at the participant’s head and noticed that she had forgotten to put her processor back on before she started the trial! She had given feedback for 10 minutes without hearing any of the actual stimuli! Just goes to show that those of us with severe hearing loss often have a lot of ambient sound floating around in our heads. :)

Favorite scientific conference to attend? The conference I enjoyed attending most during my time in the APC Lab was the Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication (CHSCOM) in Linkoping, Sweden. The conference had lots of interesting presentations about the role of the brain in hearing and how the brain changes and adapts with hearing loss. I had also never attended an international conference before and loved exploring Sweden with my husband after the conference concluded.

Any words of advice for current students/researchers? Look for opportunities to interact and work with people outside of your department. Scientists with different interests and skills bring fresh perspectives to the table and, in my experience, always made my research better. Building a network that extends beyond your immediate discipline is also very helpful when it comes to job searching in the future.